Ten years ago, the UC system created a comprehensive guide of roles, responsibilities, and planning for the UC system and individual campuses to follow in responding to civil disobedience on campuses. These guidelines remain in effect to this day. As detailed below, this guide calls into question the ongoing attempt by UCLA administrators to shift blame to law enforcement for the response/lack of response to protests at UCLA.
The lengthy 2014 plan resulted from eighteen months of deliberation by the UC system. It established “a viable and fair set of best practices that preserve and promote the rights and responsibilities of free speech on the campuses, respond fairly and reasonably to civil disobedience when it occurs, and also provide safety and security to all the students, faculty, staff, and visitors on our campuses.”
Central to these guidelines was the clear delineation of administrators’ and campus law enforcement roles in managing civil disobedience incidents. The guidelines state that campus policy must “require the participation of senior administrators in decision-making about any police response to civil disobedience; clearly define the respective roles of administrators (objectives) and police (tactics) in this process.”
Moreover, recognizing the pivotal role of campus administrators in protest response, the guidelines demanded that those administrators be well-trained in protest response. Specifically, the guidelines required UCLA to “implement formal training of administrators . . . in the areas of crowd management, mediation, de-escalation techniques, the Incident Command System and police force options.” This mandatory training was directed to be conducted annually, ensuring that current and best practices in protest response would be employed.
The guidelines extended beyond mere training of administrators, emphasizing the importance of joint simulations involving administrators and campus police to rehearse responses to potential civil disobedience scenarios. Additionally, campus police were to undergo crowd management and mediation training, with an explicit directive that the initial response be handled internally before seeking assistance from outside law enforcement agencies.
The role of UC police was emphasized, with officers trained in crowd management, mediation, and de-escalation. Additionally, the initial police response was restricted to campus police, with the additional directive that “each campus police agency [is] to seek aid first from other UC campuses before calling on outside law enforcement.”
Every UC campus was directed to establish a specialized response team to respond to major incidents on their campus and to respond to other campuses. Unfortunately, although those teams have been established, they have not been trained since 2020 because the UC system and its campuses refuse to fund such training.
Recognizing that outside law enforcement might be called onto campus, the guidelines sought to ensure that it occurred as seamlessly as possible. To this end, training with outside law enforcement was mandated. Per the guidelines, UCLA was directed to create “a regular program for joint trainings, briefings and scenario planning with law enforcement agencies on which each campus police department is likely to call for assistance or mutual aid.”
The guidelines make clear that well before these protests, UCLA should have had in place trained administrators ready to implement specific, established, and well-rehearsed plans. Those plans should have covered in detail how both UCLA PD and any outside law enforcement would respond to civil disobedience on campus and who the senior administrators were who would make the call on when to execute any part of the plans.
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However, what unfolded at UCLA calls into question whether UCLA complied with the guidelines to have in place senior administrators trained in crowd control response, with written plans for response that were the product of scenario training and consultation with its police department and outside law enforcement agencies. The response to protests appears ad hoc and devoid of the structured planning mandated by the UC system.
If this is not the case, then it should be easy for the UCLA administration to identify those administrators who undertook the required annual training in crowd management and response. UCLA can simply produce the plans developed before these protests, which guided their response, and demonstrate how the response dovetailed with those plans. Finally, the UCLA administration can also show how it met the required training, briefing, and scenario planning that it was ordered to undertake both with its own police department and outside agencies prior to these protests.
Any failure to do so will lay bare that the response to date by the UCLA administration to the protest fallout is nothing more than a furious attempt to shift blame for its failures onto law enforcement.
Wade Stern is president of the Federated University Police Officers’ Association, which represents the 250 UC police officers of the 10 UC Police Departments.