After the murder of two of our classmates, Ella Cook ’28 and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov ’29, and the injury of nine others, Brunonians rushed to leave campus. Just over one month later, as we return to College Hill, the University we love is not the same without Umurzokov and Cook. This semester will be difficult.
Brown has a responsibility not merely to reassure its students, but to confront the institutional failures that left them vulnerable in the first place, and to enact concrete reforms to prevent such violence from happening again. As we see it, there are three areas in which the University must take decisive action: public safety leadership, surveillance and coordination and on-the-ground security measures.
First, Brown must address the leadership failures within the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Management. On Dec. 22, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 announced that Police Chief Rodney Chatman had been placed on leave and that Hugh Clements, former chief of police of the Providence Police Department, would assume the role of interim vice president for public safety and chief of police. This change came far too late. In October, the editorial page board argued that mismanagement by Chatman and Deputy Chief John Vinson posed a threat to campus safety. Unfortunately, the University did not act on the two votes of no confidence from both the Brown University Police Sergeants Union and the Brown University Security Patrolperson’s Association.
We welcome this temporary leadership change, but it is difficult for a police department to be effective when the officers and community lack confidence in their leaders. We call on Paxson to permanently remove Chatman and Vinson from their positions to restore public trust in DPSEM. We also call on the University to be fully transparent in its after-action review so that Brown and other universities like it can be more prepared for future threats. This review must explain, amongst other things, why it took 17 minutes after the first 911 call to issue a BrownAlert.
Second, the University and the City of Providence must work to install additional security cameras to respond to and deter crime. Despite there being over 1,200 cameras across campus, the suspect was able to escape largely unseen and commit further acts of violence. This failure slowed the investigation and forced law enforcement to rely on privately owned Ring doorbell footage to identify the shooter.
Brown is an integrated urban campus, but the University has jurisdiction to place cameras on its property alone. The lack of cameras in Barus and Holley is undoubtedly a failure of the University, but the lack of cameras in the immediate vicinity of campus is a failure of the Providence Police Department.
We welcome Paxson’s decision to install additional cameras on campus. We hope the University will take its after-action review and campus safety assessment seriously, and address blind spots wherever they exist. We call on the University to accept Mayor Brett Smiley’s invitation to integrate outdoor cameras into the City’s Real Time Crime Center, strengthening coordination between campus and municipal authorities.
Third, the University must invest in tangible, on-the-ground security measures. Although Brown has expanded card-access controls, installed additional panic alarms and is conducting security reviews, the underlying vulnerability of our open, urban campus remains. We believe that to best protect its students and staff, the University must station more DPSEM patrol officers instead of unarmed security guards in high-traffic locations. When faced with an active threat, unarmed guards can not protect students and staff. While Clements previously stated that there will be “more safety and security officers across academic buildings, residential areas and events,” we call on the University to prioritize hiring public safety officers, who understand and are a part of the Brown community, over private contractors. Furthermore, Brown should invest in physical infrastructure that allows for classrooms without movable furniture to be barricaded.
With the hiring of a new interim police chief, reiterated commitments to security presence and the installation of more cameras, the University has begun to take campus safety more seriously. But progress will be measured not by promises or committees, but by implementation and accountability. We look forward to seeing the results of these changes and know that with diligent leadership, Brown will again feel like the safe campus we once thought it was.
Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board, and its views are separate from those of The Herald’s newsroom and the 136th Editorial Board, which leads the paper. A majority of the editorial page board voted in favor of this piece. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
