Police Free Drexel

Our Demands

  • Police Free Drexel

  • Develop Police-Free Strategies of Community Safety

  • Decriminalize Blackness on Campus and in the Community where Drexel rResides

  • Divesting from PPD and the Prison Industrial Complex Now

  • Remove all References to Race in the DrexelAlerts

  • Defund and Divest from Drexel Police and redistribute funds to:

    • Community Controlled Budgets in West Philadelphia, especially Powelton, Mantua

    • Redistribute funds to academic programs such as Africana Studies, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

    • Redistribute funds to mental health and crisis-management resources on campus

  • Address the legacy of racism and redlining on campus

President Fry's Email from June 12, 2020 Pledges to conduct Independent Drexel Police Review

"Concurrent with this, I am commissioning an independent review of the Drexel University Police Department by the former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey. Our Drexel police officers and dispatchers are a trusted and respected resource devoted to the safety of the Drexel campus and nearby neighborhoods, and our communication division and police are accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. At the same time, we appreciate the sensitivity around policing and the importance of a transparent review and open dialogue with the Drexel Department of Public Safety and our community. I believe Commissioner Ramsey will help support that dialogue. He brings decades of experience not only in law enforcement, serving as police commissioner in Washington, DC, prior to coming to Philadelphia, but also as a leading voice in the national dialogue on community policing. In 2014, Commissioner Ramsey led President Obama’s 21st Century Policing Task Force, which focused on increasing trust and partnership between law enforcement and communities. He has undertaken similar reviews for other leading universities. Commissioner Ramsey’s involvement will ensure that there is an expert, unbiased and independent assessment of all aspects of policing on Drexel’s campus."


Independent Police Review Cannot be Conducted by a former member of the police community, here's why:


What do we know about Charles H. Ramsey?

  1. He is a proponent of "high-contact," "trust-building" policing tactics and an early proponent of data-driven policing, including using targeted "safety stops" to build up a database in African-American neighborhoods while he was commissioner in DC. During his tenure in Philly from 2007 to 2014, there was a spike in officer-involved shootings, with 394 total, or an average of 49 per year. These total numbers were higher than the NYPD, which has five times as many officers as Philly.

  2. His TedX talk gives you a sense of his "bad apples" approach to policing. He mentions the historical link between the police and slave patrols, but does not come anywhere close to approach a systematic critique of policing as an institution.

  3. Ramsay was co-chair of Obama's "Task Force on 21st-Century Policing" in 2015. The "Recommendations and Implementation" section (pp. 85ff.) of their final report might provide a template for the kind of platitudes and bromides we can expect from the type of oversight report the university probably wants him to generate.

  4. The Department of Justice released a report in 2015 studying the Philadelphia PD's use of deadly force during the time when Ramsey was commissioner. Here is a quote from the report: summary "the assessment identifies serious deficiencies in the department’s use of force policies and training, including a failure to maintain a certified field training program; deficient, inconsistent supervision and operational control of officer-involved shooting investigations and crime scenes; and oversight and accountability practices in need of improvement, the most notable being the need for the department to fully cooperate with the Police Advisory Commission."

As a high profile national figure does he command a hefty fee? Are there alternatives? Absolutely!



Alternatives to conducting Police Review by Charles H. Ramsey:


  1. Partner with National Coalition Building Institute and bring in the expertise for trust building between Drexel and its community

  2. Partner with PhillyWeRise to develop actions for a "Black Stimulus" in West Philadelphia through funds reallocation from Drexel's expenditure of policing.



Resources #Defund the Police:

“The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods,” writes sociologist Alex S. Vitale. “The problem is policing itself.” Vitale argues that the best way to reduce crime, spending, and injustice and to increase public safety is to abolish the police and create new alternatives.

“There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan,” says Angela Y. Davis. “There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.”

Credits: Arielle Hesse @arielle.hesse and Sam Stehle @sam_stehle