The Board of Trustees has voted to keep ACPD armed. Thank God. Keeping a sworn and armed campus police force is a good thing. There will be threats to our life and valuables on a college campus — that’s a given. Although Amherst is not particularly dangerous, “individuals with criminal histories and weapons come onto our campus” with “legitimate threats to our safety” occurring “more regularly than most of us are aware,” as Biddy wrote in her email explaining the Board’s decision. Considering the “porous nature” of Amherst’s campus boundaries, and the availability of lethal weapons in America, there is little stopping someone from waltzing onto campus with the ability to seriously hurt a lot of students. And it’s not far-fetched to imagine such a situation. For example, in the Fall of 2020 a Trump caravan drove through campus by Arms and Val. While nothing happened, with the increasing right-wing anger directed at colleges and universities, it could have turned violent.

In order to effectively deal with lethal threats, we need lethal responses. How will a community safety officer, equipped with virtually nothing, respond to an active shooter? But it’s not just an active shooter scenario that should worry us. There are many credible scenarios where people can get hurt and killed, from assault to robberies gone wrong. These are all situations where the threat of lethal force is needed.

Therefore, we need an organization like ACPD, and they need to be armed. I’m not advocating for ACPD to resume patrolling Val, or dorms, something the college has stopped in the past year. But the college needs to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios. Obviously, there are serious systemic flaws with policing in America and even within ACPD. However, we can try to improve ACPD via training, and continue to reallocate non-lethal threat functions away from ACPD.

Now, let me address some common responses to my position.

Some might say that the chance of a shooter scenario is very unlikely. That’s true. However, maybe it’s because the majority of colleges have armed police forces, which may act as a deterrent to potential perpetrators. Nonetheless, the chance still exists, and tragedies on college campuses do happen. Ideally, we can address the root causes and conditions that enable this kind of violence in the first place: preventative measures such as increased mental health resources, or an overall shift away from American gun culture. But the harsh reality stands: a shooter could still cause massive harm. We should be prepared for a worst-case scenario.

You could argue that it’s more likely that a campus officer would injure or kill a student in a shooting than they would stop a shooter with their gun. First, I couldn’t find a single instance of campus police killing a college student. It’s incredibly rare that campus police physically injure students. Second, it’s definitely a problem that police are taught too often to shoot. But that’s not an inherent problem with policing. And that’s something the College could work to mitigate.

Others recognize the need for firearms but advocate for storing them in a single location until use is required. Although this isn’t as bad as complete disarmament, this is impractical and dangerous. Seconds matter in response to a life-threatening risk. The best delay is no delay, which is only achieved by ACPD carrying firearms on their persons. Imagine an emergency in a place like Converse Hall, quite far from the ACPD building. It could require an officer to pull a 180, go back to the ACPD building, unlock the firearms, go back to the scene, and then respond. The response time between that, and between an officer just being able to immediately respond, is enormous. As Biddy said, the best of both worlds is to have armed ACPD officers who “would not be present in primarily student spaces […] except in case of an emergency.”

There are other benefits of having a sworn campus police force. One is that they have the authority to carry out certain actions only recognized to the police, such as detaining suspicious or dangerous people, and enforcing restraining orders. More importantly, the only alternative is the town of Amherst’s police department (APD). For one, APD will be slower to respond to emergencies and less familiar with the campus. As someone who has a restraining order out, I would be more afraid knowing I would have to call APD and wait for them to arrive in order to enforce it. Moreover, APD would be less accountable to the college for instances of injustice, including discrimination. Having Amherst College’s Police Department instead of (The town of) Amherst’s Police Department means the College could provide for nondiscrimination training — which isn’t perfect but is far better than no training — and the officers would be more accountable to students. Although we may disagree about how much power the students have to influence the College’s decisions, it is certainly more than the power we have to influence the town of Amherst’s Police about their decisions. Having ACPD gives us more autonomy over our own safety, as opposed to leaving it up to the external force of APD.

Last, I’d like to call attention to some of the statistics from the Campus Safety Survey from November of last year. A plurality of students (37.4%) “feel safe knowing the college has armed police. Yet a slightly larger plurality (39.6%) also is “in support of efforts to disarm ACPD.” And a near majority of students (47%) say they would not be “comfortable with [APD] providing emergency and policing services.” How is this possible? How can the plurality of people not want APD as an alternative but still want to disarm ACPD? I think this data indicates that people like how disarming ACPD sounds, but when it comes to nuts and bolts, they prefer ACPD over a non-lethal alternative or APD. No matter what you think about abolishing ACPD, you must consider the ramifications of a shift to APD, which will certainly be worse.

Considering the troubled history and ongoing practices of police in America, I don’t deny that it must be anxiety-provoking to see, or even just have, campus police officers. But the solution is not to disarm them or abolish them. We should continue to move unrelated functions away from ACPD, decrease their presence in casual student spaces, and stay vigilant in monitoring their actions. But keeping ACPD in case of the most vital of emergencies is a matter of life and death. ■

— Anonymous