Protesters gathered at Baltimore’s War Memorial Plaza on Monday afternoon to demand a public hearing on Johns Hopkins’ controversial private police force.
About 20 activists, union organizers and Hopkins faculty rallied against the university’s police department, which has been opposed for years.
Organizers voiced concerns Monday about how the force could negatively interact with international students and students exercising their first-amendment rights. Seven people were arrested at a sit-in against the department in 2019. In 2022, protests disrupted two town halls about the force.
Raven Lane, organizer and the 2018 Green Party candidate for Maryland House of Delegates in District 43, used to live in the area around the Homewood campus and first got involved with student opposition to the police force around 2018.
Now, Lane said she worried that Hopkins’ police department could partner with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s under a 287(g) agreement, which empowers local police departments to enforce immigration law for ICE.
A North Baltimore neighborhood activist said several different neighborhood associations have voted to ask City Council President Zeke Cohen for a public hearing on the police department. Cohen’s office did not immediately respond to requests to comment Monday.
“The City Council now has local control of our police,” Emil Volcheck said at the rally, noting that Baltimore’s police department is also hiring more police officers as part of the federal consent decree.
“Why should the city condone, cosign and permit a Hopkins private police department to undermine and compete with our public police department? The city should not. We need a hearing,” Volcheck said.
Hopkins said part of its rationale behind the police force was that it doesn’t want to take away from the public’s safety resources.
“As an institution committed to supporting healthy and thriving communities in our hometown, and as the largest employer in Baltimore City, Johns Hopkins has a responsibility to contribute to the safety of our neighborhoods and reduce the strain on the city’s public safety resources,” a Hopkins spokesperson said Monday.
“Johns Hopkins developed a police department because we believe every member of our community, including our neighbors, deserves to feel safe,” the Hopkins spokesperson said. “Crimes on and around Johns Hopkins’ Baltimore campuses and across the city of Baltimore directly impact the safety and well-being of our staff, faculty, students, patients and neighbors.”
But not all members of Hopkins’ on-campus community support the department or felt included in the decision-making process behind it.
“Our union has been opposed to the formation of the private police since even before we were a recognized union,” said Janvi Madhani, political action coordinator for Teachers and Researchers United (TRU-UE), a union for Hopkins’ graduate and PhD workers.
“They have stonewalled us at every level of this conversation,” Madhani said of the university administration. “It feels as if they’re only checking off boxes in terms of … community engagement.”
Madhani said TRU-UE supported the calls for a public hearing on the police force.
Likewise, Claude Guillemard, a French professor at Hopkins, said concerned faculty felt they had exhausted their options within the university and now had to turn to the city council.
Guillemard said she was concerned the department would “give a private entity the privilege to violate first amendment rights,” such as student protests on campus like those seen last year in response to the war in Gaza.
“The theory of policing that brown bodies are a threat to public space, they need to be controlled through the threat of violence,” said Lawrence Grandpre, director of research for grassroots think-tank Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, who attended Monday’s protest. “Where does that sound familiar to you? There are connections in what’s happening in Palestine and what’s happening in Baltimore.”
Grandpre also connected issues of gentrification and “the destruction of free speech on campus” to the struggle against the Hopkins police department.
Baltimore City Councilwoman Odette Ramos, who represents Baltimore’s District 14, an area including Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus, on Monday told The Baltimore Sun that she is against Hopkins’ armed police force and always has been.
Hopkins said it was “taking a phased approach” to recruiting and training its officers and introducing them to the communities they serve. The department has 16 sworn officers but has plans to expand, the Hopkins spokesperson said.
“The Department will reach 25-30 officers hired this year and reach the 100-person capacity within the next three years,” the spokesperson said.
A flyer passed out Monday titled “Safer Without Hopkins Police Pocket Guide” lists several negatives of the police force noted by activists. The last line on the flyer concluded: “Baltimore citizens cannot trust JHU to protect us.”
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