Student activists have been fighting this initiative for months. Recent events gave them just the opportunity they needed.
The Baltimore Sun reports:
Johns Hopkins University suspends plan for armed campus police amid protests over police violence, racial injusticeJohns Hopkins University officials are suspending for at least two years their plan to form an armed police force to patrol their three Baltimore campuses amid protests over policing and racial injustice sweeping the nation after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police.Floyd’s death May 25 set off a groundswell of protests against police violence and renewed attention to the university’s controversial plan to deploy as many as 100 sworn officers across its campuses. Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels said Friday that school officials decided to freeze everything for at least two years and participate in the discussion over police reform.“We want to pause and see to what extent changes both at the federal and state level, and in the broad framework of policing and additional accountability, would impact anything that we would do at Hopkins,” Daniels said.The university has not yet created its police force or hired the officers. A 15-member accountability board is tasked with overseeing the process and has only held its first meeting, according to the university.“We are committing to a moratorium for two years,” Daniels said. “During that time, we’re very open to working to see how alternative approaches to public safety might work out, and to what extent they impact the need for sworn policing and the character of sworn policing.”
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