Just before students returned to campus this fall, Pomona College announced their new “enhanced safety program” requiring ID cards to access buildings, outright banning encampments, continuing their crusade against masked protestors and most significantly, adding five new Campus Safety officers to be on constant patrol throughout the college.
For Pomona, these changes are all about “safety” and according to them, these officers will “help promote a safer environment for students.” But in all this talk about safety, I realized that I’ve never actually heard a student call the officers you see zooming around in their golf carts “Campus Safety.” For students at the 7Cs, they are known as “Camp Sec,” short for Campus Security.
That’s because for students, Camp Sec is not an organization dedicated to the safety of our community. Rather, we know them as the organization which directly aided the Claremont Police Department (CPD) in arresting 20 of our peers in April and performed a racially-motivated, private persons arrest of a Latinx professor last November. For us, Camp Sec is the surrogate police force of the Claremont Colleges and as the past year has shown, we are often at their mercy.
This is why I was nervous to ask them for help when I joined the long list of bike theft victims in Claremont.
When someone steals something you care about, it’s pretty violating. The worst part was the inherent self-blame. I felt ashamed for not locking my bike well enough to the rack outside Mead Hall. I had tried my best to keep it safe, and I had failed. As a result, I was in a pretty vulnerable state when the Camp Sec officer came to my door.
It was a prompt arrival, just a few minutes after I called. The officer stoically took my report and then had me come down to the station — for whatever reason not offering me a ride, despite the mile long trek from Pitzer — to meet with a CPD officer. They said that forwarding my case to CPD would help expedite the process.
A little after 7 p.m. on a Friday night, the CPD officer finally arrived just to tell me that the only way they would open an investigation was if I wanted to press charges. They also said that there was no chance I was getting my bike back — basically, “We can’t help you with your bike, but we can throw someone in prison if you’d like.”
Alongside the Camp Sec officer, they reminded me that I should’ve locked my bike better and I shouldn’t have left it at the bike rack for more than a day. Oh wow, why hadn’t I thought of that?
As with many college towns, bike theft has been a prominent issue for students in Claremont for years, yet the solution that both our Campus Safety and CPD have decided to implement is purely reactionary, punitive and based solely in a culture of revenge.
The thing about threatening bike thieves with prison time is that it’s not deterring them. It’s not addressing why they might have to be taking the bikes in the first place and, for the victim, it doesn’t fix the problem that I still don’t have a bike.
How can Camp Sec so boldly claim they care about “campus safety” when there is clearly no desire to put any preventative measures in place, or even more importantly, create any restorative policies to help victims.
For years, Brown University has utilized restorative justice practices for minor incidents including theft. Even if my bike was taken by someone unaffiliated with the colleges as the CPD officer suggested, I still believe we need to expand non-punitive options on our campuses — moving away from a culture of the forced isolation from your community that comes with suspensions — that will both help victims and address the causes that led to someone stealing, or even committing a violent crime, in the first place. And for the many people who see this philosophy as a way to evade culpability, I must state that proper restorative justice demands total accountability.
I have hope that colleges like ours can act as a blueprint for a community based in effective restorative justice. I hope that one day, our broader systems of policing will take note and see the possibility for change.
Unfortunately, we cannot implement any of these policies until we recognize just how deeply Camp Sec has been embedded within our lives in Claremont.
Camp Sec is who you call when you need emergency medical attention, your only choice when you get locked out of your dorm. My girlfriend was even forced to call them for help when their suite’s toilet flooded at 10 p.m. last year.
Normally, they would’ve asked facilities for help, but because it was after hours, they were forced to have an officer come into their room first to report it as an emergency. With water rapidly pouring out of their bathroom, the officer proceeded to question them in what was apparently a very similar experience to how Camp Sec asked about my bike. The officer left and then about a half hour later, someone from facilities came and was able to help shut it off.
Why are we mandated to have the surrogate police enter our private spaces to deem us worthy of receiving support? Not only was my girlfriend, a person of color, uneasy with having a strange police-like man in their room late at night and being questioned while in a state of distress, but it’s deeply uncomfortable, even for me as a cisgender white man, to have to find safety in an organization both modeled after the police and directly tied to CPD. I cannot imagine how that would make a woman and/or a trans person and/or person of color feel.
Although Camp Sec is officially run outside any specific college by The Claremont Colleges Services, they’re one of administrators’ favorite tools. When Pomona President Gina Gabrielle Starr has needed them to patrol protests or help CPD arrest some students, they’ve always been there for her. And since students are forced to be dependent on Camp Sec, the will of 7C administrators is constantly being exerted throughout all of our lives.
As a result, we are under constant surveillance. Not in the sense that they have eyes on us at all times — although I still wonder what was on those screens at the Campus Safety station — but when we are forced to allow them into our private spaces, we are made to feel as though we are always being watched (which really helps to recontextualize Pomona banning masks at their Convocation ceremony). As made clear by Pomona when they labeled their ban on encampments as a “safety measure,” their primary goal is not to ensure our “safety.” It’s surveillance.
While the encampment at Pomona was intended to be disruptive, especially for commencement, it did result in damaged property and I do believe that there were students who it made feel unsafe. However, this doesn’t negate that the encampment was built by a group of students who believed that Pomona’s divestment will genuinely contribute to the end of an assault by Israel that has now killed approximately 42,000 people in Gaza since Oct. 7. Students barricaded themselves on Marston Quad because they had seen Starr recently elect handcuffs over community dialogue. These are not the actions of students who feel safe at their college.
Meanwhile, many of the students who condemned the protests weren’t asking for this either. The antisemitism case brought against Pomona in May also complained about the ineffectiveness of Camp Sec in protecting dissenters. The case cited 17 remedies for student safety, none of which called for increased surveillance, more Camp Sec officers or ID requirements.
Yes, we do go to elite private institutions, and for many of us, losing a bike that we can afford to replace will be the worst thing that happens to us on these campuses. But we must also understand that we are learning every second we spend on our campuses: learning about how to live in a community, how to support one another, how to treat one another. We cannot learn these lessons in a system that constantly invades our community’s privacy, suppresses our voices and treats revenge as the only form of justice. The way forward is clearer than ever, community care must be centered at the core of our definition of safety at the 7Cs and cut ties with the punitive and suppressive systems that currently dominate our campuses.
Ben Lauren PZ ’25 is from New York City and is the former editor-in-chief of TSL. He heard a lot of opinions in that role and is hoping that his own can do some good for the 7C community.