PETROVA | No Justice, No Peace: Abolish Cornell Police
Public safety requires backing law enforcement while progressive policies face results-based scrutiny.
Cornell students are being told their campus cops are the front line of “capitalism or fascism,” and the answer is to abolish the whole department “today. ” That kind of language is designed to shut down thinking, not open it up. And it’s doing something else, too: it takes a handful of serious, specific complaints and straps them to a sweeping political manifesto that would leave ordinary students and neighbors holding the bag.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Under any capitalist or fascist regime, the enforcers of that system are the police. In the United States, policing departments regularly administer and protect the state's monopoly on violence to maintain class and racial hierarchies while assaulting any efforts to disrupt this oppression.
Thus, police and prison abolition has always been a fundamental struggle for the American left, especially in Black liberation movements . While many other organizing demands such as free health care should be imposed immediately, a hallmark of police abolition is incremental policy change , shifting resources from law enforcement institutions to community services.
Abolishing private university police, however, need not require much preparation. These groups are explicitly extraneous, elitist and unacc...
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Read at The Cornell Daily SunHow We See It
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Cornell students are being told their campus cops are the front line of “capitalism or fascism,” and the answer is to abolish the whole department “today.” That kind of language is designed to shut down thinking, not open it up. And it’s doing something else, too: it takes a handful of serious, specific complaints and straps them to a sweeping political manifesto that would leave ordinary students and neighbors holding the bag.
The column does land on a real problem: a private police force with public powers needs real oversight. If a Cornell officer truly entered an off-campus home without a warrant and without identifying himself, that is not a campus “debate topic.” It’s a big deal. Investigate it. Discipline it. If state law gives campus police authority off campus, then state law should also demand transparency, body cams, clear jurisdiction limits, and records that the public can actually access. You don’t fix a accountability gap by pretending the need for policing disappears.
Where the piece loses people is the lazy leap from “this officer may have broken the rules” to “law enforcement in general does more harm than good.” Cornell is not a utopia full of mental health calls and peaceful protests. It’s also theft, stalking, assault, restraining orders, and situations where someone has to show up fast and take control. Yes, campuses should have medical responders for overdoses and mental health crises, and students should trust that calling for help won’t get them ruined. But replacing cops with counselors isn’t a plan for violent crime. It’s a slogan.
And spare us the moral sorting: sexual assault “no big deal,” protest arrests “a grave offense,” with the obligatory “genocide” framing jammed into every paragraph. Universities can be heavy-handed with protests, and administrators often make dumb choices. Fine. Still, the answer isn’t to abolish the only entity on campus with the ability to stop a predator, find a missing student, or respond when something goes truly sideways. Cornell should tighten rules, narrow off-campus authority, and open the books. Reform is serious. Abolition is theater..
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.