The head of the University of Pennsylvania’s police union was not pleased to hear how Amy Gutmann had ended up lying on the floor this month at her own holiday party.
Ms. Gutmann, the university’s president, had lowered herself onto her back to show solidarity with student demonstrators who staged a “die-in” at her party as part of a national wave of protests over the killing of unarmed black men by police officers. The high-minded rationale for her action was exactly what inspired Eric J. Rohrback, the president of the Penn Police Association, to regard it as a faux pas.
In a letter published by The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper, Mr. Rohrback said Ms. Gutmann had delivered “a slap in the face to every person that wears this uniform and serves this university.” His letter accused the protesters of ignoring how the grand jury examining the shooting of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., had “fully exonerated the officer.”
The tensions that have surfaced at Penn are similar to those found at many of the nation’s colleges at a time of heightened attention to how the police treat members of minority groups. Several colleges’ police forces have also been the subject of recent controversies stemming from allegations they had engaged in racial profiling. How to equally protect all appears to be a task many continue to struggle to get right.
Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., was accused last year of racial profiling after campus security officers confronted two black women enrolled there for using their dormitory laundromat, and called the town police on a group of local black children and teenagers who had been noisy in the library. Catharine B. Hill, Vassar’s president, in August announced that the college had taken several steps to deal with the problem, such as amending its anti-discrimination policies to explicitly prohibit racial profiling and hiring a consulting firm to assist in a review of campus security practices.
As reported in The Chronicle of Winston-Salem, N.C., students at Wake Forest University held a town-hall meeting last month to discuss black students’ perceptions that the campus police ask them for their identification far more than they ask other students, and give disproportionate scrutiny to parties held by black fraternities and sororities. Regina Lawson, the university’s police chief, told the audience that her department had established a new bias-reporting system and plans to train its officers to avoid unconscious discrimination.
Police Backup
As proved by the case with President Gutmann of the University of Pennsylvania, however, college administrators who take a stand against alleged police misbehavior run the risk of alienating those they depend upon to maintain order on the campus.
In his letter criticizing Ms. Gutmann’s participation in the “die in” protest, Mr. Rohrback, the police-union president, said, “As a supervisor of law-enforcement employees, she should at the very least remain neutral and not give in to mob mentality.”
Instead of trying to refute him, the university’s administration scrambled to mend relations with its police officers. Maureen Rush, vice president for public safety, said in a letter to the campus police department that was also published in The Daily Pennsylvanian that Ms. Gutmann merely had responded “instinctively” to the protesters and “is 110 percent supportive of each and every member of our police department, and law enforcement in general.”
At the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, administrators have stood behind the university police department in a much more concrete and controversial sense, refusing demands from black faculty, staff, and student organizations that the campus police stop routinely publishing the race of suspects in campus crime alerts.
In a letter sent to Eric W. Kaler, the university’s president, a year ago, the campus’s Black Faculty and Staff Association had joined the departments of African-American and African studies and other groups in protesting what they described as a surge in campus crime alerts that described suspects as black males.
Saying the alerts had led to a rise in racial profiling on and around the campus, they called for the university to either remove the suspects’ race from crime alerts or give a written justification for providing such information. They argued that “efforts to reduce crime should never be at the expense of our black men.”
In an interview on Tuesday, Steve Henneberry, a spokesman for the University of Minnesota, said that there were “ongoing discussions between the administration and some groups on campus” about such concerns but that the university continued to have a policy of using racial descriptors in its crime alerts.
“The belief is that a well-informed community is an asset to public safety,” Mr. Henneberry said, “and that involves providing as much information as we can to our community.”
Fighting Bias
The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, which counts among its members the public-safety departments of about 1,200 American colleges, has sought to push colleges to end racial profiling through voluntary accreditation standards for its members.
Under a standard that it adopted in 2012, the association requires that colleges have a written directive that prohibits officers from engaging in “bias-based enforcement activity” and profiling based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or socioeconomic status.
It says such a directive should require that all officers receive entry-level and biennial training to prevent profiling, that all complaints of biased enforcement be investigated, and that such complaints be reviewed annually to identify trends or training needs.
It’s unclear, however, how much weight such standards have. Just 18 college agencies have earned the group’s accreditation, while 23 others have earned accreditation jointly through the association and the Commission on Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies.
Christopher G. Blake, chief staff officer of the law-enforcement administrators’ association, said agencies without accreditation may well have developed profiling policies on their own.
The effectiveness of anti-bias training programs for the police also remains in question.
Maria (Maki) Haberfeld, who studies racial profiling as a professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York, says when police officers are caught engaging in biased enforcement, “the first and easiest thing to say is ‘We are going to retrain them.’”
She said she was skeptical, however, of the belief that police officers can be taught to operate without bias in a few training sessions because bias against certain groups can be so entrenched in their thinking. Moreover, she said, “you can come up with the most wonderful training program, but if you are not offering it to the right people, it is not going to improve anything.”
David L. Perry, president of the law-enforcement administrators’ association and chief of police at Florida State University, said one of the main factors keeping more campus agencies from being accused of racial bias or excessive use of force is “our foundation in community-oriented policing.” He said campus agencies have been at the forefront of the community-policing movement, which they have embraced easily because they routinely interact with students and other people on their campuses on a daily basis.
Gary J. Margolis, a former chief of police at the University of Vermont who now consults with campus police departments, said such agencies “tend to be a little bit more sensitive to the dynamics of race just because of the nature of an academic learning environment,” where topics related to race are more often discussed.
If there is a major change that the recent police-shooting controversies is likely to bring about among campus police agencies, it may be in the popularization of the body-worn police cameras being advocated as possible deterrents to bias and other bad police behavior.
About 350 campus agencies have watched a webinar on such cameras that the law-enforcement administrators’ association offered in September, according to Tom Saccenti, who helped organize the presentation as chief of police at Furman University. He said the cameras, which his own agency began using in 2013, have helped in enforcing both laws and campus codes of conduct—not just by documenting what an officer is seeing, but by changing the behavior of those being filmed.
“It is accountability for both sides,” Mr. Saccenti said. “The officer knows he is being recorded, but you can clearly see that there is a camera on the police officer. We have seen a change in behavior in a lot of people who we talk to because they know they are on a recording.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
