A Brief and Violent History of Campus Policing

by Police Free Penn, updated by Disorientation Guide editors in 2025.

If you walk west down Market St. from 30th St. Station, in 1.5 miles you pass through the jurisdictions of six police departments: Philadelphia, Amtrak, SEPTA, Penn, Drexel, and Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA). Philadelphia is one of the most heavily policed cities in the U.S. and home to two of the country’s largest campus police forces: Temple University Police Department and the University of Pennsylvania Police Department (UPPD). Following 2020’s nationwide uprisings against the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, a growing coalition of organizations are demanding the disbanding of campus police departments. 

As the state that stole these Black lives passes toothless legislation and bloated police budgets, our work is only beginning. Both history and our current reality have shown that capitalism, racism, and policing go hand in hand, in a partnership called the United States of America. In the U.S., modern policing traces its roots to slave patrols in the South, showing the inherent racism built into policing from its inception. Furthermore, American policing has a long history of union busting in Northern cities as well as the genocide of Indigenous peoples on the frontier. Universities in this country, like the police, also have deep historical connections with two pillars of the U.S.’s founding, stolen African labor and stolen indigenous land (see: The Enduring Connection Between Penn and Slavery, Penn’s Treatment of Indigenous Peoples). These connections persist today in the form of massive endowments, large real estate holdings, racist monuments, and museum collections. Campus policing, while a newer development, aligns with and continues Penn’s and America’s legacy of violence and oppression.

Police have always existed to protect the interests of the rich and propertied, and today universities increasingly profit off of the prison industrial complex. While we don’t know exactly when Penn first hired security for its campus, we know that by 1938, 13 armed guards were empowered by the City of Philadelphia to make arrests on and near campus. These guards described their duty as protecting property and running “bums” off campus. Campus policing in its modern form took off in the Civil Rights era, in direct response to student anti-racism and anti-war protests.

By the 1960s, Penn’s guards had compiled a list of “undesirable elements” who were “saying nasty things about the Administration.” Moreover, the guards allegedly attempted to bug the Daily Pennsylvanian office. Students, however, pushed back against the growing police presence. In 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., graduate students successfully petitioned the University to disarm the daytime campus guards. The following year, Penn students and other Philadelphians held a week-long sit-in at College Hall over the construction of the University City Science Center, which was displacing Black West Philadelphians. This violence was international, as the center was contracted to research chemical weapons for the Defense Department. While this sit-in ended peacefully, on other campuses student activism was met by state repression. The 1970 murders of students at Kent State by National Guardsmen and at Jackson State by local and state police led Nixon to commission a report on “campus unrest” and led to the creation of more professional campus police forces. Penn’s current police force was officially established in 1974, amidst the suppression of student protests around the country. While not all campus police are armed, and not all are embedded with city police, Penn has both.

We continue to see campus police used as a tool to suppress student activism today. In 2022, University administrators also used UPPD to intimidate protestors at the Fossil Free Penn encampments, which demanded divestment from fossil fuels, the preservation of the University City Townhomes, and the democratization of Penn. When Fossil Free protestors stormed Franklin Field during the homecoming football game on Oct. 22 to demand climate and community justice, UPPD arrested 19 people, 17 of whom were Penn students. 

Over the last two years, Penn, along with most universities across the nation, has violently escalated and expanded its suppression of student activism, most notably pro-Palestine actions and organizations. At Penn’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment in spring of 2024, as well as other actions that year, Penn Police and the PPD surveilled and threatened students, while doing nothing to protect them from harassment by pro-Israel counterprotestors. Meanwhile, administration painted the encampment and its student leaders as “threats to campus safety”, and took disciplinary action against them for protesting genocide. Hundreds of police in full riot gear swept the encampment early in the morning of May 10, arresting 33 people, including both Penn students and Philadelphia community members. Just a week later, on May 17, police brutalized students occupying Refaat Al-Areer Hall, tasing them and leaving several with injuries that required hospitalization, before arresting nineteen people. Penn’s Temporary Open Expression Guidelines, written as a direct response to the encampment, establish rules that severely limit students’ ability to voice any form of dissent without risking extreme and potentially violent repercussions from police and administration. In fall of 2024, when students held a peaceful vigil to mourn the lives lost in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, administration and police surrounded the mourners and forced them to leave campus. That same fall, 12 police officers raided the home of pro-Palestine student organizers, storming their apartment in full tactical gear and pointing guns at students’ heads. They refused to show a warrant or badge numbers, and no charges were ever brought against the students. Today, Penn Police, the PPD, and Penn administration continue to escalate their campaign of violent repression of student and community voices that threaten to disrupt the wealth and power of an institution comfortably complicit in genocide, and all forms of capitalist oppression and exploitation. 

Campus police are also a means of gentrification. The expansion of campus policing complemented Penn’s role in destroying the Black Bottom neighborhood, developing “University City,” and expanding its campus westward (see: Penn’s History of Displacement). During the 1970s, Penn asked Philly police to increase patrols around the new “University City,” while 60 Penn police officers patrolled Penn’s campus. The University increased its security budget to $675,000 (around $4 million adjusted for inflation) and hired former Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) officer Merle Smiths, Superintendent of Safety. Thus, Penn police coordinated directly with the City’s notoriously racist police department while fortifying Penn’s growing hold on West Philly, a practice that continues to this day.

In the late 80s, state and federal legislation required universities to maintain an open crime log, feeding the false narrative of runaway crime. Today, this system manifests in the mandated alarmist text notifications we all receive about “suspicious individuals.” In 2001, Penn made an official Memorandum of Understanding with the PPD, which included a push for Penn Police to have more power outside of campus boundaries. Maureen Rush, the former Vice President for Public Safety and Superintendent of Penn Police who served Penn from 1994 until her retirement in 2021, recruited “many of her best colleagues from Philadelphia Police to Penn.” Rush’s successor, Gary Williams, was appointed January 2023.

Due to Rush, Penn’s ties to Philadelphia Police run deep. Over the decades, the City has spent millions of dollars in settlements and lawsuits against PPD’s abusive behavior, and despite the dozens of police shootings of unarmed Black people, no officer has been convicted. How racist is the PPD? In 2019, the Plain View Project compiled racist Facebook posts by 330 Philly police officers: 13 were fired, and 72 were put on desk duty.

Campus policing has become increasingly militarized in the past two decades, especially following the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. Over 100 schools have received surplus military equipment, including armored vehicles and assault rifles, through the 1033 Program. UPPD now has its own K9 unit and SWAT team (referred to as the Emergency Response Team) which was deployed in the summer of 2020 to repress protests in the 52nd St. neighborhood, significantly outside of UPPD’s jurisdiction. UPPD has also greatly increased the number of police within the “Penn Patrol Zone” in a strategy called saturation policing, coined by abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Under Superintendent Rush, the department grew significantly to 121 officers. As Director of Special Services Patricia Brennan put it, “Maureen has built an empire here. She built a human wall.” 

We reject the ideas that policing and surveillance keep us safe, or that the University should invest millions to exclude, harass, and detain our neighbors who have long called West Philadelphia home. Police reforms will not solve the problems of a system set up to punish and control the poor and the non-white. Penn must abolish policing and transform community safety.