Following the Minneapolis Police Department’s brutal murder of George Floyd, protests have emerged nationwide to stand in solidarity with the Black community and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This movement demands immediate justice for George Floyd and the overhaul of a racist policing and criminal justice system in America. This is the same criminal justice system that enabled police to kill Antwon Rose II, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Tony McDade, Manuel Ellis, and countless other people, all the while protecting their killers from facing consequences.

Unfortunately, these protests against police brutality have been met with more police brutality. Across multiple days of peaceful protest, Pittsburgh police repeatedly escalated the situation with tools of control and intimidation. On Monday, June 1st, as confirmed by first-hand reporting and video evidence, police shot unarmed peaceful protestors with rubber bullets and sprayed them with tear gas. By doing so, the police threatened the lives of members of the Pittsburgh community, as well as Carnegie Mellon University’s past, present, and future students.

Aggressive policing and violence are unwarranted, ineffective, and unjust responses to community grief and trauma. Moreover, such responses endanger the lives of all Pittsburghers, especially Black communities.

In this petition, we highlight three long-standing violent legacies of law enforcement in the greater Pittsburgh community — legacies that harm the Pittsburgh community and students of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and in which the university is complicit. At the end of this document, we propose eight concrete actions that CMU must take to begin confronting structural racism in policing, including: cutting ties with the Pittsburgh Police; supporting CMU’s students, staff, and faculty of color through various methods such as better recruitment and retention; and making material contributions to the Black community of Pittsburgh. These steps are necessary for CMU to uphold its commitment to stand “at the nexus of technology and human life” and to genuinely honor the safety and well-being of the various communities that it has vowed to serve.

Racist legacies of the Pittsburgh area law enforcement

1. Pittsburgh area law enforcement perpetuates the same violence that resulted in the murder of George Floyd.

The history of policing in Pittsburgh is a history of racial bias against Black residents. Carnegie Mellon University has continuously failed to show substantive support for or solidarity with the Black community of Pittsburgh in the face of such crimes.

The City of Pittsburgh has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the first to be met with a consent decree mandating equity-based policing in 1997, following the murder of Jonny Gammage. He died of asphyxiation during a struggle with white police officers in the suburbs, evoking strong similarities to George Floyd’s murder. Jonny Gammage’s death at the hands of the Whitehall, Brentwood, and Baldwin Police Departments was followed by a chorus of complaints that the police force routinely singled out Black Pittsburgh area residents for false arrest and abuse. The consent decree mandate was intended to make policing more equitable, but 20 years later, Black people in Pittsburgh are still being killed by police.

In June 2018, Antwon Rose II was 17 years old when East Pittsburgh municipality police officer Michael Rosfeld shot him in the back three times as he ran away––an act caught on video. Rosfeld was the first person in Pennsylvania history to be given an unsecured bond––typically granted for non-serious crimes––on a homicide charge. He was found not guilty. Throughout the trial and after the verdict, CMU’s public statements surrounding the incident amounted to little more than referrals to campus counseling resources. Since Antwon's murder two summers ago, Omari Thompson (31 years old), Romir Talley (24 years old), Elijah Brewer (25 years old), and more have been killed by police in and around Pittsburgh, and their killers have faced few real consequences for their actions.

In 2018, Homewood native Mark Daniels was chased and eventually shot in the shoulder by three Pittsburgh police officers. Daniels was able to run to a nearby home for help––yet the officers followed Daniels, dragged, and handcuffed him, and he was later pronounced dead at a local hospital. Investigators found a handgun in a bush a week later, claiming it was Daniels’ to justify his murder, but the investigation was conducted without public transparency. No one was charged.

In 2017, Christopher Thompkins of Larimer called Pittsburgh police after someone broke into his house. When the police arrived, they fired "indiscriminately" through the front door, killing Thompkins in his own home. No one was charged.

In 2016, Bruce Kelley Jr was hunted down by nearly a dozen Wilkinsburg and Pittsburgh police in broad daylight in the middle of a populous neighborhood. They shot Kelley in the back of his head and left him on the sidewalk for hours. No one was charged.

In 2012, Leon Ford was wrongfully pulled over in his car and shot by Pittsburgh police. He survived, though he remains paralyzed. In 2017, Ford was named “Pittsburgher of the Year” for his activism around police brutality. No one was charged.

In 2009, Jordan Miles was hunted down by three white undercover Pittsburgh police with a history of similar brutal actions against Black youth. Miles was wrongfully arrested and beaten by Pittsburgh police a day after his 18th birthday, while walking to his grandmother’s house. They charged Miles with assault and litigated his case for 6 years. No one was charged.

It would be impossible to capture the entire record of Pittsburgh police brutality, much less the day-to-day experience of Black community members who carry the constant threat of biased police responses in how they move through everyday spaces that non-Black residents take for granted. This racist and violent legacy of policing shows that what happened in Minnesota has happened countless times in Pittsburgh as well, and that the violence of policing is not limited to one precinct, city, or “bad apple.”

2. Carnegie Mellon University’s support and use of law enforcement makes students and the community less safe.

All relationships that normalize police presence on campus or provide funding to police ignores policing’s legacy of harm towards Black and Brown People, devaluing and endangering the lives of our own students of color. No data currently supports the notion that police improve student safety, educational outcomes, nor student mental health.

Most critically, our own under-represented students do not feel safe or supported on this campus, as attested by a number of student testimonies of racial prejudiceon campus (See: Petition on Racial Prejudice at CMU). The mere presence of police on campus makes this student population feel unsafe, stressed and anxious, which damages mental health and creates an unhealthy campus environment. Police endanger Black students on any campus––as shown by the myriad of negative interactions involving campus police and these students. 2018 brought the shooting of Charles Thomas, a Black undergraduate student at the University of Chicago in the midst of a mental health crisis. Conditions of his arrest led to his incarceration at the Cook County Jail, where he contracted COVID-19 earlier this year. Also in 2018, Yale University police were called on a Black graduate student, Lolade Symbola, for taking a nap in her dorm’s common room. Last year, in 2019, a Black student at Southwestern University was dragged to the ground and arrested by police as a result of a suspected parking infraction.

Such events would not be outliers in Pittsburgh, given the violent legacy of Pittsburgh area law enforcement. The officer who shot Antwon Rose II was previously dismissed for cause from the University of Pittsburgh campus police force, where he had a history of violence and harassment of Black students.

CMU has a history of research investment that aids and abets the Pittsburgh police. As one example, since 2016, CMU’s Metro21: Smart Cities Institute has provided $600,000 in grant funding from the Richard King Mellon Foundation to develop and deploy so-called “predictive policing” algorithms that the PBP has been using to determine where to send additional patrols. These algorithms have been banned in other cities because they reproduce and amplify racist policing practices, often without transparency, oversight or accountability. In Pittsburgh, these policing algorithms were covertly deployed without public hearings or audits. Once they became public knowledge, they were strongly criticized by Pittsburgh community members for compounding racist policing practices against Black residents.

Finally, CMU’s extensive support of militarized technology is an extension of police violence, as police forces often have privileged access to military technology. CMU has provided extensive support for military research, including spending $172 million in 2017 in direct funding for drone warfare from the Department of Defense (DoD). Additionally, CMU quietly continued Project Maven, a lethal drone project that was refused on ethical principles by Google employees. With the increasing militarization of local police forces and the deployment of national guard to quash recent protests, these destructive technologies are increasingly used against people of color, amplifying racist police violence.

3. Pittsburgh area law enforcement has a legacy of brutal response to peaceful protest that endangers students and community members.

A pattern of violent response to peaceful protests is the norm for Pittsburgh area law enforcement. Most famously, in 2009, police attacked protesters at the G20 Summit who had gathered peacefully near the University of Pittsburgh. Police in riot gear used violent tactics to disperse the crowd, and even entered student dormitories threatening to expel students for participating in protests. Carnegie Mellon students were among those arrested and abused by police at the G20 Summit protests. Accountability for these police actions was actively blocked by the City of Pittsburgh for fear of legal liability.

Now, as protests across the country reveal the extent of police violence at an unprecedented scale––violence that Black people across America experience on a constant basis––we ask CMU’s administration to meaningfully back up its toothless statement, “Confronting Racism in Our Society”, with antiracist actions and policies to address the harms done by Pittsburgh area law enforcement and CMU’s complicity in those harms. If CMU wants to “confront and dismantle racism and injustice wherever they exist…to make society, including our own community, more just”, we suggest a set of concrete actions they should take to make those words more than empty ink. Confronting racism in society at large starts with meaningfully confronting it in our Pittsburgh community. If ever there were a time to turn words into antiracist action, it is now.

Actions for Carnegie Mellon University

To protect its past, present, and future students and to honor its commitment to the greater Pittsburgh community, we ask that university begin with the following actions. CMU should:

Divest from Police:

1. CMU should officially cut ties with the police forces of the City of Pittsburgh, Allegheny county, and all other regional municipal departments. CMU can easily begin to do so by not contracting officers for event security or use of PPD for any on-campus purposes. There is precedent for this in the bold leadership of University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel, who announced last week that UMN has ended contracts with the Minneapolis Police Department. Such a move, coupled with the resolution to end the Minneapolis Board of Education's contract with police, is in direct response to George Floyd’s murder by police and widespread demands for larger institutional divestment from policing — and has led to Minneapolis City Council’s active dismantling of the Minneapolis Police Department

2. CMU should discontinue ongoing collaborations with Pittsburgh area law enforcement, including, but not limited to, the predictive policing algorithm developed by CMU researchers. In addition, CMU leadership should publicly demand that Pittsburgh police discontinue its use of predictive policing technology and other tools that further reproduce and amplify racial inequities in policing.

3. CMU should discontinue ongoing research funding that augments lethal force and harm on marginalized communities. This should be accompanied with a severance of other augmentation of policing or militarized institutions, such as research continuing the lethal drone project Project Maven, and allowing campus recruitment for Palantir, a military contractor that manufactures inaccurate and biased predictive policing software among other destructive products.

Keep Students and Community Members Safe:

4. CMU should disarm the Carnegie Mellon University Police, and remove the current campus policies that campus police officers be present at or notified for “crowd control.” CMU campus administrators, faculty, and staff should commit to keeping armed campus police away from student events. Armed police presence at campus events perpetuates a campus culture of fear and anxiety for those vulnerable to biased and negative interactions with law enforcement. We ask for these recommendations particularly to prioritize campus staff workers over augmenting campus police funding as CMU looks to re-budget due to the pandemic

5. President Jahanian should demand that Mayor Bill Peduto institute non-violent, trauma-informed, and de-escalation-centered state responses to all protests and provide transparency and accountability on protest policies to Black Pittsburghers from now on. 50 years of research shows that of the many possible responses to protest, police violence is escalatory and makes them more dangerous for everyone.

Support its Students:

6. CMU should commit to protecting its students against harm at the hands of law enforcement as a result of nonviolent protests. As an expression of the university's value for the freedoms of speech, thought, expression, and assembly, CMU must support its students who choose to be a part of such demonstrations. This includes removing penalties for missed classes or lowered academic capacity due to jail time; providing assurances for continuation of scholarships or other forms of financial support from the university; and not collaborating actively with law enforcement to investigate, incriminate, or arrest students participating as peaceful demonstrators

7. CMU should commit to providing accommodations and support on academic expectations for its (particularly Black) students, staff, and faculty during this time, where an atmosphere of grief and rage are clear mental health barriers to productivity, and one particularly exacerbated by a global pandemic. This support should explicitly include better recruitment, retention and support of Black students, staff, and faculty in a fulfillment of the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, as well as accountability and consequences for university members that fail to uphold a campus culture of diversity and inclusion. We support the in-depth plan to address diversity and inclusion asked for in the Petition on Racial Prejudice at CMU and the asks of Black students and Black Student Organizations.

Invest in Black and Brown Communities:

8. CMU should make material contributions to the Pittsburgh community, in particular to Black-led organizations and protest relief efforts. The university should make financial contributions indicative of CMU’s $2 Billion endowment, as exemplified by other private university contributions to their communities in the millions. This would be a start at providing needed financial relief in response to COVID-19, a pandemic that has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities. A list of organizations is provided below:

1Hood Media: www.paypal.me/1Hood

Bukit Bail Fund: https://www.bukitbailfund.org/donate

Casa San Jose: www.casasanjose.org/donate

Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration: http://cadbiwest.org

Movement of Immigrant Leaders in Pennsylvania (MILPA): https://milpaen-milpa.nationbuilder.com/donation

Pittsburgh Mutual Aid: https://www.pittsburghmutualaid.com/donate

Radical Youth Collective: https://radyouthco.org/

SisterPGH: www.paypal.me/sisterspgh

SisterPGH Covid-19 Relief Fund: www.gofundme.com/f/pittsburgh-covid19-lgbtqia-emergency-relief-fund

Steel Smiling: https://www.steelsmilingpgh.org/

Take Action Mon Valley: http://tamv.org

Alliance for Police Accountability: https://www.facebook.com/apapgh/ (Cash App: $apapgh)

Thomas Merton Center: https://www.themertoncenter.org/donate/

These actions are immediate emergency responses to the longstanding crisis of a racist policing, criminal justice, and carceral system. They are also acts of reparation for past and current wrongs that CMU has committed against the communities in which it is embedded and from which it has benefited. In addition to the Predictive Policing project above, this includes CMU’s recent erasure of Black neighborhoods for up to 10 years through official university marketing materials and legacy of gentrification of Oakland and Hazelwood.

Please sign this petition and share it with others in the CMU and Pittsburgh community to demand that CMU leadership adopt meaningful antiracist policy change in Pittsburgh. If the spirit of this petition moves you, but you have different demands, we ask you to take action by contacting CMU administration in the form below with your own calls for action.

Additionally, take action by signing the Petition on Racial Prejudice at CMU which includes student testimonies of racial prejudice and broader plan of action to address diversity and inclusion.