The Costs of the Campus Speech Wars Are Piling Up for the Police

On April 27 the University of California at Berkeley was abuzz and restless. Helicopters droned overhead, orange barricades lined the edges of Sproul Plaza, and police officers swarmed the campus. The conservative firebrand Ann Coulter had been set to speak that day but had canceled. Still, the campus and the city steeled for a violent protest.

The campus police department limited access to the plaza and notified the public that pedestrians passing through the area might be subject to search for weapons and that wearing masks was prohibited. Campus officials called in about 300 police officers from across the university system and coordinated with local and state law-enforcement agencies, including the cities of Berkeley and Oakland and the California Highway Patrol. The bill for the presence of 400 to 500 additional officers amounted to about $665,000.

Every year the campus allocates about $200,000 of its police budget specifically for managing and responding to protests. For the three years preceding the just-completed academic year, spending has been level, falling within the budgeted amount. But for the 2017 fiscal year, the campus spent $894,000 on protest management. And the campus’s recently finalized budget for next year sets aside more for dealing with protests.

Residential campuses like Berkeley historically have been hotbeds of activism and sometimes violent confrontations with the police, but many colleges stumbled into a new wave of free-speech action in 2017. Protests have erupted on campuses like Auburn University, Middlebury College, the University of Washington, and Berkeley over scheduled visits by controversial figures like the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

The debate continues to rage over where a college’s support for free speech begins to conflict with campus safety. Meanwhile, the costs are piling up. As Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University, put it: “Free speech is not free.” So who absorbs the hefty cost of free-speech debate? Campus police departments pay overtime to their officers, or the city police are called in to assist: In both cases, either the campus or the city is footing the bills.

Berkeley’s protest-management budget covers overtime pay for campus police officers, mutual-aid overtime for officers from other system campuses, and pay for outside law enforcement. Additionally, the bill comprises miscellaneous charges like meals for on-duty personnel, hotel rooms for officers responding from other system campuses, pay for paramedics to be on standby, and costs for equipment.

“It’s a very divisive time for the country right now. We’ve had protests and counterprotests since forever,” said the chief of police at Texas’ Collin College, William F. Taylor. “But they seem to be worse than they’ve ever been.”

One Campus’s Frustrations

Racial tensions at Evergreen State College erupted this past spring, sparked in part by student activists’ suggestion that white faculty members and students leave the Washington campus for a day — a twist on observing a “day of absence,” when minority students would leave the campus to discuss race.

Evergreen State is a very different case from Berkeley: While it too is a public college, it is not touted as the epicenter of the free-speech movement and student activism. And it does not set aside money in its yearly budget for protest management.

Evergreen State’s security department has relied largely on local and state law enforcement to handle the recent security threats. Its campus police department is the only one in the state that doesn’t carry rifles (though officers are armed with handguns). Thurston County has absorbed some of the costs, but in a plea to the Washington Legislature, the college’s president asked the state for additional money to deal with the unprecedented security expenses, which the campus paid from a rainy-day reserve fund.

Evergreen State contracted with the Washington State Patrol for additional security staffing, costing about $135,000 in recent weeks, and about $12,000 in police assistance from the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office (a cost absorbed by the county). That was aside from the $100,000 in costs for moving the commencement at the last minute to a stadium in Tacoma, Wash., maintaining a police presence at that ceremony, and covering an estimated $10,000 in property damage to the campus, according to The Olympian.

Those clashes have some common characteristics. For example, many are protests with accompanying counterprotests, and a good number of the “black bloc” protesters who escalate violence are outsiders. Nicholas B. Dirks, who was Berkeley’s chancellor during a violent February incident, referred to those protesters in a campuswide email as “armed individuals clad in ninja-like uniforms who utilized paramilitary tactics to engage in violent destructive behavior.”

At the University of Washington, an event on January 20 featuring Mr. Yiannopoulos happened to coincide with President Trump’s Inauguration Day. The event, planned well ahead of time, had taken on another dimension after the U.S. presidential-election results, and the university’s police department took that into account. It met with student groups and city law-enforcement officials. A rally against the inauguration in downtown Seattle took the marchers four miles to the campus, and someone shot a student protester.

“No one’s ready for someone to pull out a gun,” said Norman Arkans, a university spokesman.

In the case of the University of Washington protest, the City of Seattle paid about $55,000 to cover the cost of 95 municipal police officers, The Seattle Times reported. The university’s expenses totaled about $20,000, with the College Republicans, the group that had invited Mr. Yiannopoulos, footing about half of the bill.

Money for local police overtime pay comes out of the city’s pocket when emergency reinforcements are provided as part of mutual-aid agreements that campuses sign with their cities to provide backup across jurisdictional boundaries. But in the case of the police presence at Evergreen State’s graduation and the requested additional presence for the Yiannopoulos and Coulter events, the campuses must reimburse local agencies for those services.

Planning for a New Wave

After the February 1 clashes in Berkeley over Mr. Yiannopoulos, the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators held training sessions at four locations across the United States on how best to handle such protests. When the association convened for its annual conference, in Milwaukee in late June, its “industry challenge” portion of the event specifically addressed those types of demonstrations.

“Clearly these sorts of activities are something appearing on campuses across the country,” said a Berkeley spokesman, Dan Mogulof. “Nobody has a crystal ball, but it seems safe to assume that they will, in one form or another, continue, and we need to take that into account when it comes to our planning.”

Middlebury College, which reviewed its emergency-response plans after a violent reaction to a speech by the controversial political scientist Charles Murray, has a relatively small campus in rural Vermont. Its public-safety officers are not sworn police officers: They do not have arresting authority and don’t carry weapons. For the most part, that public-safety presence has worked well, said a Middlebury spokesman, Bill Burger, but “it clearly was stretched beyond what it was intended for” at the protest.

The college’s emergency-response plans “honestly were never constructed with this in mind,” Mr. Burger said. “If something like what we experienced here were to be on the horizon again, we would engage in a different level of planning and risk reduction.”

Being appropriately prepared could mean training with the local police to ensure cohesive strategies and equipment, or establishing policies in advance on location and facility use for speaker events, according to Sue Riseling, executive director of the law-enforcement association.

If campus police officers don’t take appropriate precautions, departments could be left “scrambling at the last minute” to bring in reinforcements, said Steven J. Healy, a managing partner and co-founder of Margolis Healy, a private consulting firm on campus safety. Colleges should be “acknowledging where we are and today’s climate, recognizing that protests are a reality you have to deal with.”

What’s Old Is New

“Usually, protests on campus are cyclic,” said Mr. Taylor, of Collin College, who is also a former head of the campus law-enforcement association. “Campuses will go a number of years with a lot of protests, and then they’ll die off for a while. Then another wave will come through.”

In fact, campus police spending at Berkeley in the 2009 fiscal year dwarfed that of last year, totaling $1,587,720. (The campus incurred significant costs as a result of protesters’ occupation of a grove of campus trees, and in other years saw large-scale protests of tuition increases, for example.)

After 2009 the police response to Occupy protests in the university system gained notoriety, particularly when an officer pepper-sprayed student protesters on the Davis campus.

“That’s part of the challenge,” Mr. Lake said, regarding the heavy intervention at Davis: It costs money to acquire training for staff members that will result in an appropriate level of protest supervision.

Aside from the visible costs for campus security, the California system has seen, time and again, that other spending racks up when police methods are criticized, including repairing property damage, convening task forces to assess police strategy, covering the costs of resulting lawsuits, and even doing public-relations damage control.

Edward Walker, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, points to the “Dow riot,” at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1967, when hundreds of students protested American manufacturers of napalm. The police responded with extreme force. A riot got completely out of control, Mr. Walker said, and police officers were not equipped to handle it.

“Each time there’s a major wave of student activism,” he said, “the authorities have to figure out a way to respect the free-speech rights of the students while still trying to manage the university’s reputation, while still trying to keep students safe as possible.”

Correction (9/28/2017, 3:34 p.m.): This article originally misstated the source of the suggestion that white faculty members and students leave Evergreen State College for a day. It was student activists, not a professor. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.