Free Republic

Under intense pressure from mostly Black community organizers, some local governments are responding to demands to defund the police and divest from law enforcement. The push to reduce police budgets and reliance on police intervention in noncriminal matters has been accompanied by calls to invest in more resources for people and communities. Not surprisingly, the same demands advanced by police abolitionists off-campus have also emerged from students, faculty and staff at colleges and universities around the country. In some cases, that has already happened. The University of Minnesota, for example, responded to the demand of the undergraduate student government by...

University of Rhode Island campus police will start carrying guns Friday, making it the final public university in the nation to arm its officers. The move to arm police came after a false alarm in 2013, when some students in a lecture hall thought they heard someone say they had a gun, setting off a panic on URI’s bucolic campus in South Kingstown. While campus police arrived at the scene in less than a minute, it took about five minutes for armed police from South Kingstown to arrive. No gun was ever found. […] A student government survey of URI...

University of Colorado to segregate dorms for students with concealed-carry gun permits Two University of Colorado campuses will soon feature dorms that allow students over 21 with gun permits to live. Currently, firearms are banned in all on-campus housing facilities. The University of Colorado said it is going to begin segregating students with valid gun permits when assigning on-campus housing. Two CU campuses - the main campus in Boulder and another in Colorado Springs - will establish a designated residential area for students over the age of 21 with gun permits, school officials told the Denver Post. In any other...

Campus police at several Boston-area colleges are renewing calls to be allowed to carry arms in the aftermath of the mass shootings at Virginia Tech. Brandeis University, which has rejected calls to arm its police in the past, has agreed to reconsider the idea. Framingham State officials are talking about it, and students at Suffolk University are circulating a petition calling for an armed force. The majority of campus police departments in the nation's four year colleges, including Virginia Tech's, are already armed, but officials at some small colleges for years have staunchly opposed the idea even as their police...