Why is TRU-UE seeking to abolish the Johns Hopkins Police Department?
What is the JHPD?
The Johns Hopkins Police Department (JHPD) is a private, armed, police force with up to 100 officers with complete legal jurisdiction and arrest powers in and around Hopkins’ campuses and property. The boundaries of their jurisdiction are nominally JHU “campuses” but extend significantly into surrounding communities, neighborhoods, and public spaces (see the Baltimore Abolition Movement’s white paper for maps and a broader history of the JHPD here).
Despite strong opposition from students, community associations, and members of the Hopkins community, the university entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Baltimore Police Dept. on December 6, 2022, legally initializing the formation of the JHPD. Despite the university being legally required to host three town halls to “collect feedback”, the MOU was rushed without democratic input or consensus from the communities over which JHPD will have jurisdiction, with the university actively ignoring and censoring those in opposition to the JHPD. In one case, the university moved town halls to an online format that did not allow attendees to speak in response to widespread protests. Branville Bard, the proposed chief of the JHPD, later claimed that “there isn’t much voicing of negative opinions” despite these protests.
Under the MOU, JHPD has full arrest powers within legal boundaries, but it is important to note that at any time, power can be reverted to BPD. JHPD is an additional layer of policing on top of BPD – it is not an alternative. It is certainly not a “more accountable” or “more progressive” version of policing given that this MOU was created despite the opposition of thousands of people, including JHU’s own Faculty Senate, graduate student and worker organizations (TRU-UE, GRO), undergraduate student groups (including but not limited to the SGA, Students Against Private Police and Coalition Against Policing at Hopkins), 5 out of 7 of the surrounding neighborhoods who would be under JHPD jurisdiction, and a petition of 6000+ members of Hopkins and residents of Baltimore before its formation. Most recently, in 2025, 1000+ city residents called on the City Council to hold a hearing and overturn the wildly unpopular MOU.
Most campus organizations have come out in strong opposition to this police force, but not a single one has come out in support of it. This begs the question – who wants the JHPD? Who benefits from policing these boundaries? And can Hopkins claim this police force was formed democratically?
For a more thorough history and analysis, we invite readers to read this document written by TRU organizers and sent to the Johns Hopkins Police Accountability Board (JHU PAB). JHU PAB claims not to understand any negative opposition and has either ignored or responded hostilely to the clear concerns brought to them by students, workers, and community members. They continue to neglect direct requests of them to intervene in the sham process of democracy. Through numerous interactions with the JHU PAB board, the PAB has made explicit that they are merely an advisory board and hold no institutional power over the actions of the JHPD, rendering their entire proposed function useless. Far from keeping the JHPD accountable to the community, the Police Accountability Board serves instead as PR for JHU’s armed militia.
How has TRU opposed the JHPD? And why is abolition a labor issue?
TRU has opposed the creation of the JHPD since 2018, when the university first announced its plans for a private police force. Over the course of the Fall 2018 / Spring 2019 academic year, TRU worked in coalition with other groups (Students Against Private Police) to stop the university’s plans for a police force, organizing petitions and multiple walkouts which were ignored by the university administration.
This culminated in the Garland Hall Sit-in, which happened as a result of university administration refusing to meet with students or faculty to have a public discussion on the formation for a full year (April 2018-April 2019).
Despite being endorsed by student groups and local neighborhood associations (who voted to oppose the formation of a private police force), and despite being supported by faculty and student government (including the GRO and SGA), the sit-in was declared an unjustified “occupation” by university administration. The university claimed a commitment to free speech, yet JHU President Ron Daniels openly refused to meet with students. After a month, university administration coordinated with BPD to shut down the protest. In the early morning of May 8, 2019, roughly eighty BPD officers broke in the doors and arrested the remaining participants.
The combination of burnout and unjust student conduct hearings in the aftermath of the sit-in forced a restructuring of organizing over the next year. New student groups (including TRU) came together and in 2020 a new coalition called Coalition Against Policing at Hopkins (CAPH) was formed, with over 6000 signatures and 81 student groups collectively signing another petition to demand the abandonment of a private police force. During the collection period of this petition, and in response to the murder of George Floyd, the university administration announced a pause on the formation of JHPD. The university announced it was “committed to establishing this department through a slow, careful and fully open process,” an empty promise it made as it rushed through the MOU process.
TRU has its roots in anti-policing and anti-ICE campaigns, as some of the foundational issues that graduate workers organized around.
Beyond our local history, the history of labor in the United States is inextricable from the fight against policing. The formation of police forces is both inherently racist, as the first forms of police served as slave catchers, and anti-labor, as they have been used to suppress worker protests and strikes since the 1800s and as recently as 2024 and 2025.
Briefly, in the late 1800s, as the working class grew increasingly multiracial and started building organized labor power, employers decided it was time to fund a well-equipped police force to protect profits by maintaining both the means of production and White supremacy. As workers began to resist, advocating for fair working conditions and striking back, employers deployed armed police to violently quell protests. Police were formed as a direct response to the growing labor movement (read about the Great Strike of 1877 and the Haymarket Strike of 1886). See this presentation from one of our early events against the JHPD!
With majority support, TRU brought the abolition of the proposed JHPD to the bargaining table in 2023. Though the JHU administration refused to engage with our demands for abolition, we did win key protections around our right to protest without being met with force among other foundational wins to build towards the abolitionist horizons we are committed to fighting for. Read more in this section!
It is important to note that we are not the only labor union on campus that has opposed the JHPD. UNITE HERE Local 7, the JHU food service workers union, and SEIU 1199, healthcare workers at the JHU hospital, have also publicly expressed their opposition. We stand in solidarity as fellow workers and understand that police are a threat to our labor power and ability to organize for fair working conditions.
The presence of a private armed police force severely limits our ability to enforce and fight for our contract through assembly, speeches, demonstrations and strikes! Within a year of its deployment, JHPD has already harassed workers on multiple occasions, targeted non-white workers, threatened union organizers with arrest for flyering, and intimidated, harassed, and surveilled workers at actions that are protected in our contract. Continuing the precedent of police forces being used to quell worker protests and strikes since the 1800s, and the many contemporary examples of private campus police forces across the country violently threatening student and worker protests, the JHPD poses a direct, violent threat to our ability to demonstrate, strike, or otherwise protest against Johns Hopkins.
As workers and as an internationalist working class, we refuse for our labor to contribute to the ongoing forms of structural violence that JHU forces us to be complicit in – from the policing of Baltimore to profiting from the genocide of Palestinians.
We are at a unique juncture where City Council has been returned local control of policing and has the power to repeal the MOU by way of holding a hearing on the issue of the JHPD and listening to the voices of Baltimoreans. We encourage members to get involved with community led efforts through the Baltimore Abolition Movement on this front.
Importantly, as graduate workers, our power lies in leveraging our relationship with our boss because we run Hopkins. TRU-UE will be headed to the bargaining table in 2027 after the expiration of our contract and have the ability to withhold our labor. We can and must use our power to permanently stop the JHPD!
What does abolition mean?
Abolition is the practice of building a new world where we create the conditions that render our current conception of prisons and policing obsolete. It means anchoring into a collective practice of taking care of each other as members of a community. It is the redirection and diversion of wealth, resources, and power from systems of policing, incarceration, and profit toward systems of care that empower and meet the needs of our communities, allowing them to live safe, dignified lives. Fundamentally, abolition is a material analysis of violence that understands that violence does not just lie behind the barrel of a gun, but that, in practice, violence is structural.
Institutions like Johns Hopkins enact structural violence on the city of Baltimore and its residents through land dispossession and gentrification, for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, militarization through private policing, creation of technology and research to enable US imperialism, suppression of dissent and protest on campus, wage theft and capital accumulation at the expense of workers, and much more.
In stark opposition, abolition is the active creation of a world in which we center human relationships, dignity, and care as the driving force behind our decisions, both personally and structurally. This means healthcare as a universal right, access to safe and affordable housing, access to education, eradicating the conditions that lead to food insecurity, and receiving a fair wage and value for your labor, to name a few.
We believe that Johns Hopkins has a moral responsibility to invest resources and redirect private wealth to building community wealth and infrastructure. We do not believe that there is any future in which we can coexist alongside violent police, even if they have received so-called “diversity training”. The facts and the history of policing in the United States demonstrate that no amount of training can undo the harms of policing, because policing is fundamentally about protecting property. The only possible future for this burning world is in building safe communities where everyone is guaranteed dignity and has their basic needs met. Hopkins has the opportunity to be at the forefront of this rising tide.
A future where private employers can unleash state violence upon vulnerable people is untenable.
How is the union committed to keeping its members and the community safe? And how will TRU-UE continue to build power against the JHPD?
As workers, residents, and community members in Baltimore, we benefit from and are a part of many of the communities surrounding Hopkins. We must stand in solidarity with our neighbors, friends, and coworkers who have made it clear that the formation of the JHPD would pose a direct threat to their safety and well-being.
In our first bargaining survey, 60% of respondents reported that the formation of the JHPD would threaten their safety or well-being or that of their coworkers. As a union, we must protect the interests of all graduate workers, and therefore cannot stay silent on an issue that will harm many of our members. Ultimately, police keep none of us safe but in particular, we must stand in solidarity with our coworkers who are disproportionately impacted by police violence, including non-white, non-citizen, and trans graduate workers.
We are already making significant wins along this front! We are the first graduate worker union in the US to win historic abolitionist protections against the use of police to repress labor action and the use of surveillance against union members. Our contract also upholds our right to an unarmed behavioral health response in cases of drug use and mental health crises (see Article 20 of our contract). We successfully took direct action to remove illegal surveillance towers from campus in 2024. We will continue to fight until we remove the threat of policing all together.
TRU-UE is committed to investing in and creating sustainable systems of community care that provide meaningful safety. In order to provide this alternative, we proposed in our collective bargaining agreement that the extraordinarily large amount of funds allotted to the JHPD is instead used to establish and support safety measures that actually keep us safe. We know that the University has already invested millions of dollars into the police force. If Hopkins can afford this extraordinary cost, it can certainly afford to invest in the much more affordable and effective safety measures we propose: safe and reliable transportation, the option to pursue a restorative and transformative justice conflict resolution approach for instances of interpersonal harm, public health approaches to mental health crises and drug use, a non-militarized campus, and much more!
If you are interested in getting involved in the fight, please join our bi-weekly Solidarity and Political Action Committee meetings! Email trujhu@gmail.com for details!
What’s next?
Our current contract, TRU’s first, won historic protections against surveillance and the heightened policing of our membership. However, JHU has repeatedly violated these sections of our contract and has refused to engage in our contractually defined grievance process for issues related to the JHPD. This is part of a broader pattern, as demonstrated above, in which the university misuses the language of “community engagement” and “public safety” to avoid accountability to the people who will be policed by the JHPD.
Luckily, we have an upcoming avenue to press the university on this matter – our contract renegotiation. Community-led organizations have already begun the fight to end the JHPD at the City Council level. TRU has the opportunity to contribute to these efforts by explicitly connecting our precarious working conditions to JHU’s enormous investment in a private, armed militia. Not only is this militia dispatched to illegally interfere with members who engage in federally protected union activity, but its very existence also speaks to the university’s priorities. Academia and scientific research are under attack, but instead of investing in the people and labs whose work keeps the university’s doors open and its nonprofit status intact, JHU has opted to invest further in its aspirations to undemocratically exert control over the city of Baltimore and its residents.
If you are a graduate worker who is interested in organizing to end the JHPD, email trujhu@gmail.com and a TRU organizer will contact you!
If you have had a negative experience with the JHPD, please share it at the link below! Anyone can share their experience whether they are a grad worker, staff, faculty, student, or Baltimore community member. You can do this anonymously if you wish.
File complaints against JHPD and upload them to a publicly viewable repository here!