The IFA Board sent the following letter to Chancellor Gillman in response to his August 6 email to the UCI community regarding policing and race at UCI.
Dear Chancellor Gillman,
We write as board members of the Irvine Faculty Association, part of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, in response to your August 6th email to the UCI community regarding racism and policing, and to the August 5 communication by the Public Safety Advisory Committee to which you refer therein. We appreciate your stated commitment to tackle ongoing racism not just in the United States broadly but in the UC Irvine community directly. We also appreciate your mentioning the important role that police reform must play in such a process.
We note, however, that you do not mention the fact that UCI has seen an increase of $179% in its policing budget since 2009–far greater than at any other UC campus in both absolute and percentage terms. We do not understand how this increase occurred given there has been no fundamental change to security and/or other threats faced by faculty, students and staff at the University that would require an almost tripling of UCIPD’s budget. Given that you have been Provost and then Chancellor of UC Irvine since 2013, we believe you are in a position to explain how this happened. We also note that incoming UC President Drake was Chancellor from 2009 through 2013. We thus call on you to make public any discussions and documents from the UCI Administration since the 2008-2009 academic year that would help shed light on how and why the unprecedented increase in the UCI police budget occurred.
We further call on you and the PSAC to address, through an independent committee operating in the spirit of shared governance, how the UCI police budget can be reduced in this time of fiscal crisis and increasing awareness of the deleterious effect of policing on campuses to a much more financially sustainable level, one that is compatible with the values and well-being of the UCI community. We call on future UCIPD budgets and policies to be discussed and approved by the divisional Senate, who should have a mandated and enforceable oversight role in police budgets and policies. The IFA stands willing to participate in an investigation that would involve the divisional Senate as well as UCI faculty who have particular expertise in issues related to policing. We believe that any reforms that do not both reduce the police budget significantly and reorient its policies and procedures along more holistic and sustainable lines will fail to accomplish the laudable goals set out in your recent communications to the UCI community.
We would appreciate a reply as soon as possible and look forward to working together to tackle these crucial issues for the future of our campus.
Sincerely,
Irvine Faculty Association