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UCS passed a resolution supporting the arming of the Brown police on Monday, November 4. The decision was the next step towards guns in a debate that has dragged on for years. The last time the issue came up was in 1996, when "Coalition Against Guns at Brown" formed to thwart the request of the Security Department to be armed. At the time, the coalition gathered 1,000 signatures against the arming, and a referendum put out by UCS found 77 percent of students were opposed to the arming. These and other factors left then-President Vartan Gregorian with such an entanglement of pros and cons, that he saw no compelling reason to change the status quo. He did, however, leave the issue open to debate in the future. That moment came last fall, when the Department of Police and Security reported a significant increase in robberies and aggravated assaults on and around the Brown campus. DPS reported that the number between 2000 and 2001 had jumped from two to 21 assaults, a number that the Bratton Report later stated was incorrect. Still, the final figure of nine to 19 incidences was enough to spark a report by Donald Reeves, and grab the University's attention. The University spent a million dollars (in addition to normal DPS funding) on "yellow jackets," extra security guards donning yellow and black coats, overtime hours for regular DPS officers, and the hiring of four Providence Police officers on overtime detail to patrol the campus during evening hours. On March 8, 2002, two African American freshmen got into an altercation with Brown police officers who had asked to see their student IDs. According to the police officers, their "age and their attitude," apparently similar to Hope High school students suspected of vandalizing Faunce Arch, sparked the inspection. The incident provoked ire from much of the Third World community and brought policing and racial profiling to the center of campus life. An investigation by the President's Office found that there were errors made by the police, but did not recognize the incident as a case of racial profiling. Then, as part of a general initiative to assess and improve campus security, President Simmons commissioned the now-famous Bratton Report, which made recommendations to revamp all parts of Police and Security. Amid all its suggestions, the Bratton Group stated that suggestions regarding patrol and response to street crime would "not be nearly as effective if implemented using unarmed officers." The major thing it took to task was Brown police's disengagement policy, which requires Brown police officers to call and wait for Providence Police to respond to any incident where a weapon is thought to be involved. This semester, student response has included newspaper editorials and campaigns by the student group Third World Action. The administration held three forums inviting students, administrators, professors, and police officers to discuss their concerns in a public space, and UCS held a town meeting in late September to discuss arming. Despite an email and table slipping, attendance at the meeting was low. UCS decision UCS discussed, but did not put out a referendum to the student body. Council member Tim Bentley explained: "The council thought, and also the word we've been getting from the administration, is that a referendum would not be appropriate, because the spirit of a referendum is that when the students have an opinion, that will be the final word. We would be giving the students a false impression that they were making the decision [if we did a referendum] because it couldn't be just student opinion, it needed to be students, faculty, community and police." The UCS decision came almost three weeks ago, and the council voted 19 to 6 to support the arming of the Brown police. President Simmons has said she will reach a decision by the end of this semester, and now the UCS resolution will be another factor weighing upon her decision. At the November 4 meeting, the overwhelming sentiment was that council members were not voting on whether to introduce guns to the Brown campus. As one council member put it, " It's not a question of whether they want to bring guns to Brown campus, they're already here." For many Brown students, the University's decision last fall to hire Providence Police officers-made without public discussion-turned the question of bringing guns to campus into a moot point. "Student outrage shouldn't have been with the discussion of whether or not to arm the Brown police," said Tarek Khanachet, a member of the UCS Campus Crime Committee, who helped drafted the pro-arming resolution. "Student outrage should have been last fall when the first thing Brown University did was to bring four after-hours squad cars from the Providence Police Department to patrol our campus for us. These squad cars respond to all events Brown police respond to with Brown police." Among the 19 UCS members who voted in favor of the resolution, several were students of color with strong ties to the Third World community, which has been concerned about the arming because of alleged instances of racial profiling. Thilaksani Dias, a sophomore member of UCS, said "I can't express how much I care for the Third World community. I'm completely against guns. If it was a matter of introducing guns, I would be against it. But it's just because it'd be replacing Providence police with Brown police." Anti-Arms Many anti-arming activists are not satisfied with that answer. They are not convinced that guns on campus will make anybody safer. "Having a gun won't help them prevent crime from happening, it would only allow them to engage with it afterwards, and the only thing that they would engage with would be an escalation of violence, like someone's gonna get shot, which is inexcusable," said Hana Tauber B'03. Tauber is also worried about the larger message arming would sent to the surrounding community, the values it belies in terms of Brown being an open campus. She and some other students put up an art installation on the Van Wickle gates one morning to illustrate their point: "The Van Wickle gates are amazing because they're like the front door of Brown and they're always locked except for the entering class and the leaving class. We tied chicken wire to the front of the gates and put barbed wire above so it looked like a prison gate. We had pictures of guns and a sign that said, 'Yes, We Are Open.'" Police Perspective Brown Police officers on campus argue that violence already does exist on and around the campus, and they simply want the tools to do their job. "We've had some issues right on campus where weapons have been produced." said Captain Emil Fioravanti, who joined Brown's police force this August. "One officer had a weapon pointed at him in Sayles Hall, the guy pulled the trigger, the weapon misfired. [Without arms] you're asking a police officer to go up against a potentially armed person with nothing to defend himself." Officers at the University of Rhode Island are waging a similar battle to be armed, though their arming must by the Rhode Island House and Senate, because they are part of a state-funded institution. The concerns of Officer Mark Chearino, who works at the URI campus in South Kingston, echo many of those of Brown police officers: "The other night I was chasing a suspected car thief through the woods, and I said to myself, 'Self, why am I here?' I want to go home every night and kiss and hug my kids and wife." It is also true that Brown Police and Security BUPS operates on a much stricter level of policy and procedure than other police forces in Rhode Island and in other parts of the country. The Brown University Police is one of a handful of forces in the country that have been accredited by CALEA, the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. The commission has over 400 standards, policies, and procedures to be followed, and is something that does garner respect from peer forces like the URI police. The unresolved issue of racial profiling is another factor that gives many students pause to an arming of police. Every Monday, a representative in plainclothes from the Special Victims Unit of DPS (a new unit created upon the recommendation of the Bratton Report) sits on a couch in the Third World Center, waiting to discuss concerns or questions about the complaint process. In five weeks, this reporter was the only person who had come to talk with her. "I wouldn't say no news is good news," said representative Cheryl Ferreira, "because I know there are issues on campus." Racial Profiling Despite DPS's effort to make a safe and neutral environment where people can express their concerns, many students of color may still not feel comfortable telling their stories to Police and Security. Nikhil Laud is one of the six UCS members who voted against the arming. He said that DPS's efforts to reach out to students of color are not effective enough. When Laud himself tried to register a complaint with DPS last year, he was unsatisfied with the response he got. He went to the Police and Security office, but was sent home to wait because nobody there could talk to him. "Finally someone calls," Laud said. "And when I explain the story to him, it wasn't "Okay, I understand." It was 'Oh, no, I know this guy; you must be mistaken. He's a good guy, he's not a racist.' And I was like 'No, I was racially profiled. I know I was.' And he tried to convince me of how I was wrong, or how I was mistaken, or maybe confused." Several instances of racial profiling have been explained by the fact that police officers mistook Brown students for Hope High School students. Laud sees it as a point of contradiction with the University's larger goal of being an open campus: "I think of it as, they have this urban look to them, you know whatever that means, and they're people of color, but it's this look that the Brown police and Brown doesn't want to associate itself with. Whatever they see Hope High School students as, they don't want Brown to be that. So they've tried to keep them away." This raises another question about how Brown relates to the surrounding community and whom it wants on its campus. The Bratton Report stated that because Brown is an urban campus, its perimeters are in effect, "everywhere," and that effective police and security work needed to "exhibit a high tolerance for outsiders and diversity." What that tolerance looks like, and who the outsiders are, is bound up in Brown's notions of community and its responsibility to the people it wants to feel safe. Gaby Coppola B'02.5 thinks universities are ideological apparatuses of the state, but she learned that at Brown. |
copyright © 2002, The College
Hill Independent
last updated 11 22 02
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