As Johns Hopkins Asks for Its Own Police, Residents React With Suspicion

The morning after Baltimore saw its most violent day of the year so far, with 14 people shot and five killed in the span of 24 hours, Ronald J. Daniels, president of the Johns Hopkins University, was in Annapolis to testify before Maryland lawmakers. The grim events of the previous day colored his testimony.

“The front page of The Baltimore Sun is especially jarring today, but not unprecedented,” Daniels told the General Assembly on February 22. “The scale and intensity of this violence, by any metric, is undermining the ability of our city and its citizens to thrive. It is hindering economic growth and opportunity. And it demands new solutions from all of us.”

Daniels had a particular solution in mind: the creation of Johns Hopkins’s own armed police force of 100 officers, a proposal that requires legislative approval. Lawmakers discussed it on Wednesday, and a vote may come soon.

University leaders have bent every effort to gain support for what they call a necessary step. Baltimore’s mayor, who recently received campaign contributions from top officials at Hopkins, and the police chief have vocally supported the idea even before the current proposal. Baltimore has a crime problem, they say, and a new police force would help keep students safe on the three city campuses.

But local residents are wary of the university’s intentions. They cite instances of Johns Hopkins swinging its weight around to get what it wants — often at their expense, they say. They object to a private police force in a city with a well-known policing problem. The thought of a police force accountable not to the public but to the university makes them uneasy. They’d rather see investments in youth programs and other steps that could curb the cycle of crime in the long term.

The controversy illustrates the difficult side of a mammoth university’s regional influence. Hopkins casts a long shadow, and some residents are tired of living in it.

‘Decades of Documented Distrust’

Dayvon Love, public-policy director at the Baltimore think tank Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, which advances the interests of black residents, says he’s dead-set against the idea of the state authorizing a police force for the university. Increased policing, he says, would only weaken the university’s already strained relationship with Baltimore’s black community.

“There has been several decades of documented distrust and organized opposition to the growing role that Hopkins plays in East Baltimore,” Love says. “After the displacement and gentrification that Hopkins has caused, a private police force is just another insult.”

The frayed relationship between the university and the community is years in the making. Residents point to the controversy over Henrietta Lacks, a Baltimore woman whose tumor cells were taken by Johns Hopkins Hospital — for widespread use ever since — without her consent in 1951.

Much of the university’s checkered reputation has to do with its large and expanding footprint in Baltimore. It’s Maryland’s largest private employer, employing almost 50,000 people and contributing billions of dollars to the state’s economy every year. Some community members say that power comes at a cost to Baltimore residents.

In 2001, Johns Hopkins joined with the city and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a local philanthropy, to start the East Baltimore Development Initiative. The $1.8-billion project began as an aggressive urban-redevelopment effort that university officials said would “revitalize” the neighborhood. Critics called it gentrification.

Much of the neighborhood was torn down to make space for a research-and-innovation hub for the university that would also serve as a new cultural center for the city. In the process, nearly 800 families were relocated and promised they would be provided with low-income housing to return to within a few years.

The project stalled during the recession that began in 2008, however, and it wasn’t until late 2016 that Eager Park, as the university calls it, started attracting new business. By 2018, though, despite years of promises, only one in 10 displaced residents had returned, and less than 25 percent expressed interest in doing so, according to the Sun. For many residents, the entire project is still a fresh wound.

Donald Gresham, president of the Baltimore Redevelopment Action Coalition for Empowerment, has always lived in Baltimore. For years he’s been a community organizer and distrustful of Johns Hopkins. The conversations he’s had with residents of East Baltimore have confirmed for him that he’s not alone in that feeling of apprehension.

“There’s a trust issue between the community and Hopkins because we feel very strongly that we’ve been here before Hopkins expanded the way it has, and they moved us out of the way to get what they wanted,” Gresham says. “I believe this institution wouldn’t do anything that will benefit us more than it would benefit them.”

The idea of more policing isn’t a comfort to many in Baltimore who were outraged by the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died from injuries he sustained while in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department in 2015.

A group of more than 60 faculty members at Johns Hopkins signed a public letter in opposition to the proposed armed police force, calling it an “undemocratic” and “antagonistic” move by the university. Lawrence Jackson, a professor of English and history and a Baltimore native, says he’s concerned about what this could mean for the community he grew up in.

“I just absolutely do not believe that empowering even more police officers who inevitably will be selected from the standing Baltimore City Police Department will help the situation,” he says. “There is no citizen redress with a private police force that owes its principal allegiance to the university.”

Gresham, the community organizer, says he and his neighbors worry about an additional presence of armed police. In 2017, the city’s police department reached a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice, which found that it had violated the civil rights of black residents for years. Although Hopkins says there would only be about 12 armed officers patrolling at any given time, Gresham says more police officers would be “overwhelming.”

“It’s aggravating to me because they want us to believe that they’re doing the best for us, but it’s just about fitting their agenda,” Gresham says. “It feels like we’re being controlled by the university when they’ve already devoured everything in sight.”

Ronald Daniels, Hopkins’s president, says the university’s commitment to the city is unequivocal. Hopkins has provided grants to a local nonprofit groups and has funded public schools and recreation centers. Through its HopkinsLocal initiative, the university has spent $118.4 million with local businesses in the past fiscal year.

“I’ve been president for the last decade, and we have treated the deepening and broadening of our connections to the city as one of our most important priorities,” Daniels says. “I feel really good about the progress that we’ve made.”

‘High and Rising Levels of Crime’

Baltimore’s crime rates have climbed since the sustained protests over Gray’s death. The number of shootings in some neighborhoods has tripled; in 2017 there were 342 homicides, the most per capita in the city’s history, reported the Sun.

The university has long looked for ways to increase its investment in safety on campus. It has increased spending on security by $20 million in the past five years, according to the university, but has seen little improvement. According to federal public-safety data, there were 20 cases of aggravated assault on the three campuses that would be patrolled by the proposed police force in fall 2017.

Currently the university has an unarmed force of 1,000 security guards and a unit of armed, off-duty Baltimore Police Department officers.

Hopkins wouldn’t be alone in having an independent police force. Public institutions including Morgan State University and Coppin State University have their own, as do private institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University. A Justice Department survey found that about two-thirds of four-year universities and colleges with 2,500 or more students have armed police officers.

“What drove this was a recognition that we were in a city that was grappling with high and rising levels of crime, yet we lacked the kind of security protection that were a dominant best practice among our local and national peers,” Daniels says.

Garrett Patrick, a graduate student, lives in an East Baltimore neighborhood with a mix of Hopkins employees and longtime residents. He said he’s more than once found abandoned purses left on the street after a mugging. As a member of the board of the Patterson Park Neighborhood Association, Patrick says, he’s heard from people on his block who are in support of the force.

“We’ve dealt with a range of crime in our communities, and people are fed up with it,” he says. “We’re willing to take the help where we can get it. People are appreciative of Hopkins trying to play a role in helping the community out.”

The college he attended as an undergraduate, Washington University in St. Louis, had a private, armed police force, and he says he was surprised to learn that Hopkins didn’t. Patrick testified on behalf of the university at the Annapolis hearing. The night before, he sent around a petition of support to people on the medical campus. Contrary to the perception of overwhelming resistance to the proposal, he says, there’s substantial local support for additional police officers.

Daniel Webster, a professor of American health and director of Hopkins’s Center for Gun Policy and Research, says that because of the level of crime in the area, an armed police force has become necessary.

“What caused our huge surge of violence in 2015 — that really hasn’t abated — was a breakdown in policing. To me that underscores that policing matters,” Webster says. “It’s very difficult for some to understand what policing can be, as opposed to what it is in Baltimore right now. The kind of policing we want is professional and appropriately addresses the challenges that face many police departments, like racial profiling and dealing with mental-health crises.”

Bishop Douglas Miles, a leader of the faith group Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, also testified in support of the police force. “We would desire that no institution — public or private — would have the need for armed security,” he said at the hearing. “But currently in this city, we all know that is the world as it should be, not as it is.”

Political Prospects

This isn’t the first time Johns Hopkins has proposed creating a police force. It aired the idea last year but it didn’t get very far. Lawmakers raised concerns about a lack of community input, and the university was criticized for attempting to rush the legislation.

So it took a step back. The university studied the security models of 50 peer institutions, Daniels says. He and other officials met with leaders of colleges with established police forces like the University of Southern California and the University of Chicago, which has had its own issues with its private police force. Officials also collected public-health research on the effects of policing and went door-to-door to community members to discuss their concerns.

In early February, two state lawmakers introduced the legislation with the support of Baltimore’s mayor, Catherine Pugh. The legislature is weighing the bill, and the university says those deliberations could take months.

Questions have emerged about how Johns Hopkins earned Pugh’s support. As a private, nonprofit entity, the university is barred from making contributions to political campaigns or politicians. But on January 9, Daniels, five vice presidents, the provost, and the past and current presidents of the Johns Hopkins Hospital made a total of $16,000 in donations, as private citizens, to Pugh’s re-election campaign.

The university declined to comment on the donations. Pugh’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Pugh has supported the proposal since last year, when it was first introduced. “Baltimore needs all the assistance it can get in reducing violence,” she wrote in an op-ed in Afro last month. “A Hopkins police team with city oversight can work for everybody.”

When the legislation was announced, university officials set up public forums to address the concerns of students, faculty members, and residents. But some who attended the forums said they felt that Hopkins officials weren’t taking their concerns seriously.

Gresham, the community organizer, says he left one of the forums with more questions than answers. “When I heard what they were planning to do, I felt immediately uncomfortable,” he says. “Whatever Hopkins does with the community doesn’t end well. Those meetings were just to manipulate us into buying into what they want. It’s set up so that you’re really just there so they can say that they met with the community. They weren’t concerned about our issues or concerns, and we walked away feeling like we hadn’t been listened to.”

Quinn Lester, a member of Students Against Private Police, a student group, also attended one of the hearings. Residents, he says, still feel the university is “throwing its weight around without consulting anyone.”

“There’s a disconnect,” he says, “where community members and students still feel like they need convincing on this, and Hopkins is done with convincing. They want to move now.”

Daniels, the university’s president, says the forums were deliberate efforts by Hopkins to slow the process down and give community members and students a chance to comment. He also notes the community-oversight mechanisms in the legislation. The bill would have two oversight boards monitor the new force. One would be a 15-member board of students, staff members, and community members selected primarily by the university, with two members appointed by Pugh and the president of the City Council, Bernard C. Young. The other would be Baltimore’s existing Civilian Review Board.

The university also points to investments it will make in the community. The legislation would require the state to provide $3.5 million for the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund and $1 million for the YouthWorks summer-jobs program. It also calls for the Hopkins police force to establish at least one Police Athletic League center. The university would pay for the costs of the police force itself.

Dayvon Love, of the Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle group, says offering money for youth programs is an attempt to distract from what he sees as the core of the proposal: more police officers in a city with a policing problem.

“Given all we know about law enforcement,” he says, “the potential for misconduct only increases when you have a force that is not accountable to the public but accountable to a corporate entity.”

Zipporah Osei is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @zipporahosei, or email her at zipporah.osei@chronicle.com.