Everyday, hundreds of people walk around the Stony Brook University campus, yet there’s one group that’s hard to miss wherever you go. With blue stripes and large labels reading “police” sprawled across the sides of their car, students and faculty are familiar with the presence of the University Police Department (UPD) on campus. 

Since the arrest of 29 student protesters on the Stony Brook campus in May of last year, Stony Brook students have witnessed the scope to which the UPD wields its authority over students. 

Over the past couple decades, universities across the United States have seen surveillance on campus through forms like cameras in and outside buildings, police patrol and supervision of student activity on sites like Brightspace or Blackboard. While the principle of such measures is to ensure campus safety and academic integrity, we should be wary of the way we are being observed around the clock on campus. 

The scale of police on campus 

According to Stony Brook’s UPD website, the department employs around 190 people, including 68 sworn law enforcement officers. In 2019, the average number of police officers per 1,000 residents in the Northeastern U.S. was around 2.8 officers. Stony Brook has about 26,000 students, with 10,514 living on campus. This means there are at least 2.6 officers per 1,000 students — comparable to the regional average. Given that less than half the student population lives on campus, Stony Brook appears to be overpoliced relative to its residential population.

How did universities get police on campus?

In order to understand the role of UPD on campus, it is important to break down why colleges have campus police in the first place. 

University spaces didn’t always have a police presence. Before campus police, campus security was part of the duties of professors, administrators and workers like watchmen, who were hired primarily for custodial purposes and often had no law-enforcement experience but were tasked with taking on officer-like duties and campus social control. In the 1960s, stemming from student protests on campuses, universities shifted to establishing their own campus police departments that would act similar to traditional law enforcement. 

Local police were called in often during student protests in the 1960s, so university presidents lobbied to make their own campus police departments, leading to the university police departments we see today. The protests in the 1960s were centered around eradicating racially discriminatory laws, police violence and colleges’ complicities during the Vietnam War. In response, universities increased police budgets and received equipment and training to respond to the civil unrest. Campus policing is a recent phenomenon that grew out of the need to control the bounds of the First Amendment. Though it is true that the need for campus police has changed as new issues on campuses have emerged in modern times, like school shootings and hate crimes, it seems like campus police has not forgotten its legacy. 

This past May, we saw a wave of student protests that, like in the 1960s, were met with overwhelming police response and misconduct, even here at Stony Brook. During the pro-Palestine protest on May 2, 2024, professors spoke of the overwhelming police presence against students, as well as their “thug”-like demeanor exhibited towards both faculty and students. Stony Brook UPD’s mission statement is “to foster a safe environment for [the] campus community” through its services, but if students and faculty did not believe the UPD handled the campus’s most tense moments appropriately, then it is clear that changes in the way UPD functions are needed.  

Enterprise Risk Management and its lack of transparency

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) at Stony Brook raises more than a couple concerns in regards to what exactly they do and how they operate. They describe their role on campus as “[serving] as the control tower that supports a holistic, risk-aware culture rooted in compliance, ethics, safety and accountability.” Although there are similar risk management structures in other universities, it is odd that our campus police operate directly under this office. According to a New York Times article on the legacy of former Stony Brook President Maurie McInnis, McInnis had created the Division of Enterprise Risk Management based on her experience being provost at the University of Texas in 2017, where there was a fatal attack involving a mentally ill student. However, this division is unique in that it oversees Stony Brook’s UPD and even has a vice president and chief security officer, Lawrence M. Zacarese, who was a former police chief. Bruce Branson, an associate director of the ERM at North Carolina State University went as far as to call this unusual in an interview with the New York Times, mentioning that directors of risk management offices often have backgrounds in internal auditing or finance as well. 

Zacarese had substantiated complaints filed against him as an officer back in 2001 for “abuse of authority” and “physical force” against a 25-year-old black male. Although Zacarese was found not guilty and retained no penalties, the complaint being “substantiated“ meant that his conduct violated NYPD rules and should have received discipline. A former officer with a past of misconduct having the authority to oversee our campus police poses unnerving questions on whether ERM operates under management that performs their roles with the safety and rights of students and faculty in mind. 

The ERM also put a job advertisement out in around May of last year (shortly after the protest arrests) for an intelligence specialist. They were looking for someone with a bachelor’s degree in fields related to criminal justice, homeland security and psychology, among others. On a campus full of kids that have just recently passed the threshold into adulthood, it is highly bizarre that ERM feels the need to hire someone who has a background in homeland security. For context, the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for handling matters like terrorist risks/attacks and border protection, among other tasks. Stony Brook seems to be heading in a direction where its administrative offices are becoming more militarized towards its students and faculty. 

What is perhaps the most unnerving is the description of duties, with one of them being to support the development of a “University-wide intelligence and insight program for Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) at Stony Brook University.” In May 2024, the University Senate voted to independently investigate how ERM handled the student protests, but since then, little information is known on whether this was done. The lack of any sort of transparency to the students and faculty at Stony Brook on how a potential “intelligence program” would work and what that would mean for our privacy is frustrating. Whether someone was hired for this position seems unclear, but the advertisement itself is a sign of changing tide in what Stony Brook considers to be “risk management.” 

Robert Chase, a professor at Department of History with interest in carceral studies, explained the significance of these developments. 

“By having intelligence gathering be one of their [ERM’s] areas of expertise and capability, they’ve created a new kind of policing apparatus to respond to what they perceive to be a new environment of student protests with a particular eye towards vetting out external influences,” he said. “[They are] seeing student protests through the lens of national security or terrorism threat.”

What Stony Brook policing and surveillance needs to address moving forward

On April 10, an email was sent out to students and faculty that 11 student visas were being terminated that day. According to AP News, there have been over 1,000 students that have had their visas revoked or legal statuses terminated since late March. The cited reasons included “criminal charges,”  such as speeding, parking tickets and acting out against national interests, in reference to Palestine. On April 25, 2025, the Trump administration reversed their moves to revoke thousands of student visas, including the 11 from Stony Brook. Despite this move, it is still uncertain if termination of student visas will still be pushed, so it is more important than ever to pay attention to how UPD handles these policies. If information on students’ charges led to revoked visas, then it is safe to reason that police on campuses where this was happening were the ones who were providing this information to the federal government. In addition, knowing that Stony Brook ERM was setting out to hire someone with a background in homeland security during the height of the pro-Palestine protests, it is deeply unsettling to think about where we as an institution are heading. 

Will universities like Stony Brook resist federal pressure to penalize student dissent? Will Stony Brook actually protect its students and faculty? That is something only time will tell. For now, all we know is that the tides are changing here at Stony Brook when it comes to policing for the past year, and we as students and members of the Stony Brook community should keep a watchful eye. 

“I am concerned that Stony Brook is actually in the forefront of a new development of campus policing through the creation of ERM and [giving] a former police chief [an executive level position], ” Chase said. “And elevating policing to an executive level so they have more administrative power and decision making. So that they’re not just executing policy, they are writing policy.”

It is equally important to relay that all of this information does not mean that ERM and UPD are setting out to watch and surveill everyone on campus with the intent of compromising a student’s future at Stony Brook. They could truly be doing all of this for safety purposes, and likely are, but without any sort of transparency, we won’t know. Being aware of Stony Brook’s stance on how they decide to protect students is more crucial than ever, especially with the risk of losing members of our international student community. Recently, several universities in Florida have signed agreements with the federal government to allow campus police to “question and detain undocumented immigrants.” Some of those Florida universities signed on to 287(g) agreements, which allow local law enforcement (now including university police) to perform the functions of an immigration officer. 

Although such an agreement is unlikely to happen in Stony Brook as we are in a democratic state, the problem is that we don’t know what UPD’s relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is going to look like. The Trump administration has already begun to put federal funding freezes on universities like Harvard for their refusal to give reports on antisemitism and Islamophobia since October 2023. It may only be  a matter of time before universities like Stony Brook get hit with threats of freezing federal funds if they do not comply with the demands of the Trump administration. The threat of federal oversight on the futures of university students and faculty is looming over us, and the Stony Brook community needs to know that there will be safeguards in their campus community to fall back on.

When asked about what he thinks is important for students to understand about the normalcy of policing and surveillance, Chase expressed, “My message to students is simply that for a long time, universities embraced this mantle of security and safety … and now we are in a moment where the politics of the moment have reached onto campuses and made them less safe.” 

If the University follows in the footsteps of Stony Brook Medicine, who stated that ICE agents would need a court order to access their facility, then that would add a layer of protection that international students need during this time. As suggested by campus protesters on April 16 who were protesting against the removal of 11 students with visas, there should be University resources to know what our rights are. Regardless of the reinstatement of student visas, we should be able to attend our University knowing that our campus police would not hand over our information with federal agents. We should be able to be confident that we are able to express our right to protest and have discourse without the fear that we are being tracked for doing so. 

It is hard to know what the future holds for Stony Brook and the members of its campus. But what I can say for certain is that this is the time for us to take a look at the police and surveillance structure that was built on campus and truly evaluate who it serves. Does it serve us, our rights and our ability to go on campus without fear of being wrongly displaced, or does it serve the interests of a presidential administration that is stifling constitutional rights at every level? We came here to learn, to speak and to protest while feeling safe doing so. If Stony Brook forgets that, then it forgets what it means to be a university at all.