One of the selling points Chicago admissions was really pushing when I was considering it was how they had the second largest police force in the state. Uh, guys

Its not really a great selling point and honestly im very skeptical of these separate peace officers being needed

I’m not understanding the distinction between a “peace officer” and a cop.

it's a distinction between 'cops are people who bust in risky doors and arrest armed dangerous people' and 'cops are people who give out traffic tickets and watch over public art festivals' and so we just sort of have two different career paths for different roles, even if they're both "police"

If they can arrest you, they’re a cop

Cops are a subset of peace officers

cant have a gun. We have them for weird purposes (rail cops etc etc) but also they are only in like two provinces and not all universities

That just sounds like UK police. The US has rail cops too, but they’re just actual cops

Yeah thats the basic idea. Regular cops armed here though. also like rail cops jurisdiction is strictly on property Although for the uni theres relatively few of them to the population

Campus PDs usually have jurisdictions limited to campus + a small area around it. A lot of US universities are the size of large towns / small cities (eg ASU Tempe has ~80k students/faculty/staff on a >600acre campus). It’s not that unreasonable for them to have their own PDs

ehh i mean maybe its the guns, but i find it unlikely that theyre necessary unless its some funding issue. We basically only gave them arrest powers in 2019 for our big universities which are comparable

Can’t get hung up on the guns. Everyone in America has guns

maybe we also just have much less crime? but idk im skeptical theres strong reason to have more than security (which seemed to work fine before 2019) as far as i can tell its mostly because US jurisdiction and force structure is really weird

Moose can get pretty violent

This is why only pistols are banned lol

From what i can see, separate armed police are pretty much uniquely American, although toronto has had a security service since 1908 and has a staff of like 30 peace officers for 125000 students and employees

I didn’t go there but there was definitely a lot of campus security at UVic. Unarmed obv. Here in mtl there’s all kinds of neighborhood security details driving around doing who knows what

right but specifically looking for cops/peace officers not just security