Young progressives don’t see why all of America can’t be like the campus—where opinions deemed insensitive are not allowed in the student newspaper or the lecture halls, where all expenses are covered (by loans or parents), and where authority is only affirming rather than threatening. The worst that can happen to you is expulsion. This is how the workplace should be, and this is how Chicago and Baltimore, Minneapolis, and D.C. should be, too. So defund and disband the police, or at a minimum open them up to more civil suits by getting rid of qualified immunity and break up the police unions. Ideally, legal proceedings should be as close to campus Title IX proceedings as possible. If this makes it impossible for police to use force, or discourages them from doing so for fear of complaints, well, that’s the whole point. A campus doesn’t need cops.
Campus America is the political ideal of a generation. And the college-educated professionals who subscribe to this ideal may have little to fear and much to gain from it. The losers will be, as always, the less well-off, especially black Americans, whose lives are significantly more threatened by criminals than by police officers. “Black Lives Matter” is a slogan that doesn’t apply to black-on-black crime, certainly not with anything like the force it applies to the rarer instances of white-on-black crime and police abuse. This doesn’t matter to the socially awakened young elite of today—how many of them ever plan to set foot in a place like Ferguson, Missouri? See no evil, hear no evil.
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