Campuses’ Anti-Police Tactics Make It Harder For Law Enforcement To Do Their Job

Eleven people were injured Monday, one critically, after an Ohio State University student plowed his car into bystanders, jumped out, and began stabbing.

That horrifying scene could have been far worse. As divine providence would have it, an armed campus policeman was on hand, investigating reports of a gas leak, and he was able to shoot the attacker dead within a minute.

That officer’s heroism saved the day—but if campus protestors at Ohio State University and elsewhere got their way, such an armed intervention would have been impossible. The university and its students have been overtly anti-police in the past year, and other activists nationwide have called for campus police to be disarmed altogether.

This semester, several OSU students hosted an on-campus “die-in,” in an attempt to call attention to killings of people of color by police. Other students participated in a march to the mayor’s office, decrying police brutality and demanding that the police budget be slashed.

“It’s important that we hold the cops mother-f*cking accountable,” one woman majoring in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at OSU raged to the student newspaper in September.

That anti-cop sentiment is not limited to students; even at OSU, it has sometimes been institutional.

Campus Reform reported that last January, OSU nursing students were required to participate in a webinar propagating the left’s claims of systemic racism reinforced by police brutality.

“All communities have been assaulted by police for generations,” the webinar claimed. “Now that we have cell phones, we’re learning more about it.”

Meanwhile, a Columbus Dispatch report conducted an in-depth, largely critical investigation last year into the Ohio State University police, asking whether officers “use force too often.”

Anti-cop sentiment isn’t limited to Ohio State University. In fact, at Villanova, Portland State University, and other colleges, students have demanded that campus police forgo their firearms altogether.

But the reality is that armed officers are increasingly necessary to keep campuses safe. The past decade has seen several school shooters on campus, a phenomenon that will doubtless be exacerbated by terror.

Already one law-enforcement officer recently told the New York Times that the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations are “targeting the school-shooter types, the mentally ill, people with dysfunctional families and those struggling to cope with different issues.”

Though we don’t yet fully know what happened at OSU on Monday morning, one fact is clear: Students were unbelievably lucky that 28-year-old Alan Horujko, an OSU alum and campus police officer, was there when he was.

Regardless of the campus’s hostility to police officers, regardless of the optics of a police officer shooting a student attacker, Horujko drew his gun and protected the students he had vowed to serve.

Horujko did so knowledgeably: He had received in-depth Use of Force training this summer, preparing to use the same powers that anti-police campus activists have so vehemently opposed.

It’s also worth noting why Horujko chose to become a campus police officer. In a 2015 interview with the OSU student newspaper, conducted not long after he was sworn in, Horujko described how working at Student Safety Services during his studies had changed his career path.

“Seeing what the police do… behind-the-scenes stuff,” he told the Lantern, was what “really led me to a law-enforcement career.”

“That’s kind of what led me to wanting to become a police officer,” Horujko continued, describing how he had abandoned engineering after three years of study.

To be sure, there are bad cops out there. And any place dominated by a single party and its political machine–as far too many urban centers have been for far too many decades–is a breeding ground for corruption.

That doesn’t negate the fact that many young men and women just like Horujko enter law enforcement for the right reasons, performing their job with honor and courage.

Higher education’s obsession with “safe spaces” have too often led to abjectly unsafe circumstances, and Monday’s events were no exception. Campuses’ black-and-white thinking—their utter lack of nuance on law enforcement—have made it harder for good police to do their job well, particularly on college campuses.

But on OSU’s campus, a good cop with a gun made all the difference this week. Law enforcement’s longtime detractors on campus owe Officer Horujko their thanks.