SAN FRANCISCO — University of California police will be replenishing and increasing their stockpile of weapons and equipment — including drones, bullets and thousands of pepper ball rounds — as part of an annual request approved Wednesday by the governing board of regents.
As UC’s handling of protests and campus security comes under scrutiny from the Trump administration, five campuses — UCLA, Irvine, Santa Barbara, San Diego and San Francisco — asked for more weapons, while those in Berkeley, Davis, Merced, Riverside and Santa Cruz did not seek to make new purchases.
The biggest request came from UC San Diego, which said it needed 5,000 new 5.56-millimeter caliber rifle rounds to replace ones used in trainings. At UC Irvine, police asked for 1,500 pepper-ball projectiles. UCLA, which has a significant weapons inventory compared to other campuses — among it 39,500 rifle rounds and ammo — made relatively few requests, including four new pepper-ball launchers and 100 sponge foam rounds.
California law enforcement agencies are required by state law to make annual reports on the acquisition and use of weapons that qualify as military equipment. The definition includes munitions, explosives and long-range acoustic devices, which are regularly used by U.S. law enforcement and are not exclusive to the military. Some equipment under the definition, such as drones, are not traditional weapons but used for patrol and special events.
“With the exceptions of UC San Diego, all of the campus’s requests are for non-lethal alternatives to standard-issue firearms, enabling officers to de-escalate situations and respond without the use of deadly force,” UC spokesman Stett Holbrook said in a statement. “The requested items are essential for maintaining operational readiness, supporting ongoing training programs, and above all, ensuring public safety.”
A report from the office of UC President James B. Milliken presented Wednesday to the board of regents, which approved the requests, added that the tools “are not used indiscriminately but with caution to protect the lives of UC community members/visitors and UC officers when bringing an incident to a conclusion with the least amount of force.”
The report said “no UC campus uses or receives goods from the U.S. Department of Defense and Law Enforcement Support Office program for surplus military equipment.”
Under the state law, police departments also have to disclose use of qualifying weapons in the last year. In 2024, the report said the weapons were primarily used during training and that new orders would help replenish supplies used in those exercises.
There were dozens of non-training exceptions at UCLA:
- On June 10, 2024, police deployed 240 pepper-ball projectiles “during an incident involving an aggressive crowd.” It added that none of the rounds were “aimed at individuals and there were no reports of these rounds directly affecting any person.” A single sponge foam round was also fired. Police were responding to a pro-Palestinian encampment and protest.
- A long-range acoustic device was used for crowd management 71 times. The report described the device as “a portable speaker used to provide increased sound and clarity over public address systems, bullhorns, or megaphones so officers can effectively communicate with crowds and provide emergency directions to people in large areas so they can take immediate actions such as sheltering in place or evacuating.”
- A sponge foam round was fired “during an arrest when a suspect put their hand near a police officer’s firearm.”
The report also detailed non-training uses at two additional campuses: UC Davis deployed drones 11 times for “patrol and special events,” and UC Santa Cruz also used a long-range acoustic device for crowd management at least once.
California Assembly Bill 481, which requires the disclosures, was signed into law in 2021. But public scrutiny of UC policing has grown since 2024, when pro-Palestinian protests grew across the 10-university system and officers clashed with demonstrators at several campuses.
UCLA police, the LAPD and California Highway Patrol were faulted in internal and external reports, including one compiled by a congressional education committee, for a failure to coordinate and quickly respond to a violent attack on a UCLA encampment on April 30 and May 1, 2024. The agencies have also faced criticism and lawsuits by pro-Palestinian protesters after officers shut down multiple demonstrations that year.
Since then, UCLA has created a new top campus safety post, installed new police leadership and instituted changes to protest rules, including zero tolerance of encampments.
Speaking Wednesday during a public comment period at the regents meeting, UCLA associate professor Chelsea Shover encouraged regents to reject the purchases.
“My concern is that it will be used against students and faculty,” said Shover, who works in the medical and public health schools. In an interview, she added, “I have no confidence military-grade equipment will make the campus safer, as last year’s UCLA campus protests made clear.”
Together with demands President Trump has made recently to restrict protests and speech freedoms at UCLA — in exchange for the release of frozen federal research funding — “this sets a worrying and chilling effect on rights protected by the 1st Amendment,” Shover said.
Graeme Blair, a UCLA professor of political science who was part of the 2024 encampment and additional pro-Palestinian protests, said he believed Wednesday’s presentation “obscures an extraordinary use of force that injured students and faculty” during the June 10, 2024, campus protest that ended in arrests.
Blair said the police-fired projectiles ended up “hitting students and faculty, leaving them bruised and with burning eyes.” Police reported only using one foam round. Blair said he witnessed multiple rounds.
“The fact that UCPD fails to describe these harms calls into question whether they can be trusted with more munitions and their deployment,” he said. “Less-lethal munitions like sponge rounds, rubber bullets, and pepper balls have no place on a college campus, much less to be deployed against students and faculty exercising their right to free expression.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
