In the “national conversation” that we’re largely not having about militarized policing, I have nothing important to contribute. For what it’s worth, I forced my undergraduate Sociological Theory class to apply different theorists’ analyses to recent events in Ferguson. I’m vaguely aware of ongoing police surveillance, disruption, and violence in communities of color, and I’m lucky enough to have enough radicals on my news feed to know that we don’t know how many black people the police execute each year. But for me, in my citadel of privilege, it’s all background noise.

I did, however, see a University of California Police Department officer the other day walking from her car – parked on the street outside my office – into the underground, mostly hidden campus police station. She was carrying an assault rifle and a shotgun.

As it turns out, there’s more where that came from. That same day, the Daily Californian reported that UC Berkeley’s PD actually has 14 assault rifles, which they got from one of those federal programs that gives away military toys the same way the Engineering Department occasionally sends the social sciences some old computers. I checked the campus news for that day, to see if there was any plausible reason for the PD to be breaking out its heavy weaponry. According to their spokesmen, the rifles are necessary because its 9mm pistols “won’t defeat the body armor.” I’m not sure whether it was the Dean of the School of Education announcing her resignation or some students starting a campus version of BitCoin which created the need on this particular day.

This would all be sort of comical – I mean, comical relative to the not-at-all comical uses of military weaponry in Ferguson – if the UCPD hadn’t actually killed a student. I don’t know if any of my Princeton friends – accustomed to unarmed “P-safe” officers whose job it is to tell you to turn the music down at your illegal dorm-room party full of under-age drinkers – caught that, so I’ll repeat it: UCPD killed a student. By all accounts, it was suicide by police: a “troubled” (yes, it would seem so, seeing as he had multiple previous attempted suicide attempts) student brandished a gun in the business school and they killed him. His name was Christopher Nathen Elliot Travis.

The incident has stuck with me, but it’s disappeared from institutional memory. The Daily California makes no mention of it beyond one-week after the event. The UCPD annual report from that year does not see the incident as meriting a reference, although in the third paragraph they do state that their big event of the year was that they “hosted a very successful scenario on our campus that simulated the hostile takeover of an animal research lab, complete with escaped primates challenging the teams.” The crime statistics state that no homicides happened on Berkeley’s campus that year. The “independent” campus police review board also made no investigation into what happened, presumably because Christopher did not file a complaint in a timely manner.*

Perhaps the date of that unmemorable killing – November 9th, 2011 – sticks in my mind because it’s the night I was arrested by UCPD. I actually still see the officer who broke my ribs, booked me, and then lied to the police review board about it, telling them I was “cocky” because I asked for my rights, on a regular basis. Police still freak me out. But this is small change. As a _____ (insert list of synonyms for “privilege”), I don’t get beaten, arrested, or shot by police at random. But when I look at my sections for the course I am teaching, I realize that most of those adjectives do not apply to them. 80% of my students are non-white. My black students come from a community in which five unarmed men have been killed in the last month by police; my Latino students from neighborhoods where the police are the means for tearing families apart; many of my foreign students from countries where the police are the enforcement arm of authoritarian states.

“Trigger warnings” have been a buzzword of public discussion of academia in the last year. The justification for “trigger warnings” is that our students have suffered forms of trauma that might be resurrected through exposure to sensitive material. I have mixed feelings about whether course content should be subject to trigger warnings; but while we’re on the subject, perhaps we should also consider the trauma of our students who have watched their families, neighbors, and people who look like them get deported, beaten, frisked, imprisoned, arrested for kissing their white partner, or shot. I don’t even approach the level of having suffered “trauma,” but I for one would like to know when and where representatives of the only campus group that have killed a student will be, so that I can – for my own safety and psychological well-being – stay the fuck away.

Like I said, I have nothing to say on this. I have no way to comprehend what it’s like to be constantly victimized by the police, because it isn’t part of my history. But I do speculate that, for at least some of our students, a “civil” campus climate might start with an absence of assault rifles and, while we’re at it, any institution that thinks it needs assault rifles to be part of campus life.

*Of course, we could say that students waving guns is exactly why we need police: then again, this is just ceding the terrain to idiocy, since we could also just say – as many other advanced countries have – that people shouldn’t have guns, and watch our homicide and suicide rates drop in tandem.