The Department of Public Safety, as part of the accreditation process for the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, is conducting a survey to measure community opinion and collect feedback. They run such a survey every three years.
Surveys are an interesting means for gathering information about a community. In a best-case scenario, a survey works because its questions and response choices have been carefully crafted, information about its existence is made widely available and the information gathered is ultimately used responsibly.
Even when all of the aforementioned conditions are met, however, a survey's appropriateness still comes into question when its purpose is to poll for majority responses to issues that primarily affect those in the minority. A poll of a largely white audience, for instance, does not necessarily reflect the experience of other segments of the population. This fact might prove problematic for the DPS survey, since the segment of our community most likely to have negative experiences with the police are men of color.
Still, ignoring any questions as to the validity of using surveys of this kind to shape policy and frame discussion, it remains apparent that this survey has been set up to fail from the beginning. One of the questions on the DPS survey asks, "based on your experiences with the Department of Public Safety Officers, how would you rate officers' attitudes and behaviors towards members of the Brown community?" On first glance, that seems legitimate, until you look at the possible response choices given: extremely respectful, very respectful, respectful, fairly respectful and disrespectful. Reading those response choices should give any respondent an uncanny flashback to an episode of "The Colbert Report" in which Stephen Colbert asks his guest if our president is a "great president" or the "greatest president." Other questions have equally biased options or unclear gradations between answer choices, and few allow for the choice of "none of the above," which would be crucial for developing a survey of actual statistical significance.
Worse yet, the last time a similar poll was given at Brown, only 4 percent of students and 3 percent of faculty and staff responded. This year's poll has only been announced once in Morning Mail - by a link that does not take users to the survey itself, but instead to a Web site that is a page away from the actual survey. Chief of Police Mark Porter and Vice President for Administration Walter Hunter shouldn't be surprised if this year's response rate isn't any higher than three years ago.
Running surveys in this fashion is an example of DPS and the administration's reluctance to sincerely engage the issue of public safety and the instances of racial profiling, lack of accountability and lack of transparency that have been created out of the desire to maintain an insular campus. If the use of questionable survey methodology leads to findings of a clean bill of health for the campus police, such findings are sure to be held up as proof that there is "no need for improvement," as has been the case before.
In 2002, the University commissioned a group led by former New York Police Department Commissioner William Bratton to review policies and procedures in the area of campus safety. The resulting report famously recommended that the campus police be armed. In supporting its position, the report on campus police also found "no signs of institutional racism." Despite the unlikely odds that such a finding could be accurate, there exists even greater cause for concern with respect to the University's quickness to champion the study's findings. As the New York Times reported in 1996 following Bratton's resignation as NYC Police Commissioner, "While the department under Mr. Bratton increased arrests by 25 percent, there was an increase of more than 50 percent in civilian complaints about police misconduct and brutality in the minority communities where the drops in violent crime were sharpest." William Bratton was also responsible for the authorization of new 15-round clips to replace 10-round clips for the NYPD's 9-millimeter semiautomatic handguns. These fast-firing weapons are now responsible for so-called "contagious firing" incidents, like that of unarmed Sean Bell, who was shot at 50 times by five officers in Queens last fall on the morning of his wedding. Bratton is now the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Surveys set up to fail and subsequent study reports of "no racism, misogyny, or homophobia" and "no need for improvement" are by their very nature incompatible with community complaints of wrongdoing and student pleas for investigations into the actions of potentially negligent administrators or officers. What levels of sexual assault, discrimination or police violence is it going to take before Brown begins to speak the same language as the community on which it is built?
As of last winter break, the campus police have been armed, but our officers carry guns instead of Tasers. Let's not let Brown's wake-up call be the shot of a gun.
Josh Teitelbaum 08 would like to shout out to Professor of Political Science Alan Zuckerman and Catherine Corliss GS for teaching PS 50: "Foundations of Political Analysis."
