“Students… Should Not Have Oversight Over Police”: Yalies on a YPD Oversight Board

Yale College Council Senators Will Barbee ’26 and David Fleming ’26 join Yale Daily News columnist Joshua Danziger ’28 to talk about the new YCC call for student oversight of the Yale Police Department:Will Barbee’26: “I do think it’s important to keep it in our minds, and, you know, always make sure that we’re giving them the adequate resources they need to keep us safe.” Joshua Danziger ’28: “Students, I think, recognize that the campus needs police, and New Haven needs police, and that it’s important to have a positive relationship with the department.” Danziger: “Students and graduate students and faculty are not law enforcement. They have not been trained in protecting civilian populations. They shouldn’t have oversight over police matters.”David Fleming ’26: “It didn’t work great to have student representatives in the past, not to say it can’t in the future, but I think they should be erring more towards faculty representatives on that board.” Barbee: “…[Police are] people too, and they’re people doing a job that’s important for your life.”The Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual talked about the dangers of the defund the police movement and the hypocrisy of many its biggest proponents:Mangual: “A lot of the resource constraints are often created by people who share this ideology. And the ideology is really rooted in a fundamental disagreement with the idea that a functioning civil society requires institutions of law enforcement to flourish. I think that’s true. Police abolitionists…don’t.”Mangual: “We should take note of the fact that a lot of the people offering the most extreme kind of reforms don’t stand to pay any of the price should things go south…They have no skin in the game.”Mangual: “I always ask people who say police need more oversight, where is the lack of oversight? I never really get a good answer.”Mangual: “There’s no reason to believe that a handful of students and faculty members at Yale, as great a university as it is, are well-positioned to direct or redirect the decisions being made by professional police.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst