Though students will be informed prior to the arming of Department of Public Safety officers, University officials decline to say when that day will be, saying only that DPS is "well into" the arming process.
In response to a perceived increase in crime on and around the Brown campus over the past decade, President Ruth Simmons decided last December to arm the Department of Public Safety with pistols. Each DPS officer is currently involved in more than 200 hours of rigorous training to prepare for the change, which is yet to take place.
"It's a piece of the puzzle that's too big to ignore," said Chief of Public Safety Paul Verrecchia. "We'll be able to take on more responsibility and still rely on the Providence Police Department, but more as an equal partner."
While DPS has declined since last December to provide a timetable, Simmons sent a campus-wide announcement on Dec. 1, 2003, that projected the implementation to take between 12 and 18 months.
"We're well into it," said Walter Hunter, vice president for administration. "But it's not in anyone's best interest for a timetable to be announced."
Simmons decided to arm DPS following two years of "serious and intense discussions" with officers, administrators, faculty and students, according to the Dec. 1 announcement. The issue was first introduced in 1992, when then-President Vartan Gregorian decided against arming on several different occasions, arguing that students felt sufficiently safe without an armed campus police force.
With weapons capability, officers will be able to respond to situations involving armed criminal activity, instead of adhering to the current disengagement policy. That policy prohibits officers from responding to crimes involving a deadly weapon; instead, DPS officers call PPD.
"The irony is that when members of the community most need police help, police are prohibited by policy from coming to their assistance, and Providence police are usually a ways away," said Mark Nickel, director of the Brown News Service.
In addition to an immediate response to armed crimes, arming DPS will allow officers to conduct traffic stops to investigate vehicles associated with a crime or vehicles clearly violating traffic laws.
Currently, each officer carries a baton and pepper spray. When DPS is armed, officers will continue to carry both, and the administration will continue to study the feasibility of other non-lethal weapons.
An oversight group of administrators, faculty and students is monitoring all DPS activities regarding the arming procedure. When DPS is ready to arm officers, the department will also institute a committee responsible for the extensive review of every instance when force is used.
In order to ensure that officers have the skills necessary to operate a firearm as well as deal with all of the ramifications, DPS has mandated a training program in diversity and liability issues that exceeds the requirement of any municipal police academy.
"A lot of communities don't have the diversity we have here," Hunter said. "Even if we hadn't decided to arm the force, we'd still require diversity training."
The program consists of 32 hours of training in the mental processes directly related to profiling, exposure to possible scenarios, community outreach events and ongoing periodic roundtable discussions and seminars on tactics officers can use to avoid discrimination.
"The notion of racial profiling is a short-hand term for a complex cognitive mechanism for how people think and categorize," said Brenda Allen, associate provost and director of institutional diversity. "Officers have to understand cognitively what the underlying mechanisms are and think about how they can adjust their decisions when they're engaged in situations with that cognitive packaging."
DPS does not deal with racial profiling to the same degree as local police do, Allen said. The majority of DPS crime prevention is responding to calls. "If they're responding to calls about a group of students of color, is it the officers who are engaging in profiling or are they just responding to a call?" she said.
In addition to diversity training, DPS officers and supervisors are undergoing civil liability and ethics training.
While officers are provided with firearms training, they are also trained in skills geared toward avoiding the use of force. Specifically, the skills taught are "verbal judo" and Kingian non-violence training, a negotiating technique that uses the methods of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Using weapons is seen as a last resort," Allen said. "You need to make sure that everybody has a whole lot of tricks in their bag in order to be able to do their job. For DPS, this includes negotiating tactics and using any means to deescalate the tension in a situation to avoid using force."
Ultimately, DPS can be more effective if officers have weapons capability, Hunter said. "Discussions lasted for quite a while on campus, and arguments were presented in favor and against arming," he said. "We feel that we're acting in the best interest of the community to preserve safety."
