Dive Temporary:
- George Washington College’s chief of police, James Tate, has resigned amid allegations that his division mismanaged a brand new program arming its law enforcement officials.
- The Washington, D.C., college introduced Tate’s departure Tuesday. It comes per week after the college’s scholar newspaper, The GW Hatchet, reported that the college had positioned Tate on depart and launched a third-party investigation into the gun program’s purported security and coaching shortfalls.
- GWU did to not handle questions on Tate’s depart or the investigation into the drive’s gun initiative Thursday. The establishment mentioned it intends to launch a nationwide seek for Tate’s everlasting substitute within the coming weeks.
Dive Perception:
In 2023, GWU directors started engaged on a contentious proposal to arm a choose group of campus officers as a strategy to rely much less on exterior police and reply to potential weapon violence.
Scholar and college backlash was fierce, with opponents arguing that the college’s police largely deal with low-level crimes like underage consuming and arming them wouldn’t improve campus safety.
GWU in the end went forward with the plan, and Tate was one of many first officers issued a college firearm. Final month, the police division introduced it had completed a year-and-a-half lengthy plan to coach and arm officers. The division mentioned it is going to arm a couple of third of the drive — 22 officers in supervisory roles — when it’s totally staffed.
The division additionally emphasised that it had up to date coaching necessities and insurance policies in response to neighborhood suggestions. The brand new guidelines require armed officers to finish deescalation coaching as soon as a month, up from as soon as a semester. Additionally they should full firearms coaching thrice a 12 months.
However a September investigation by The Hatchet discovered that this system’s rollout was “riddled with security violations that went undisclosed to the neighborhood.”
Former high-ranking officers mentioned the division did not register weapons, together with Tate’s, and didn’t provide the intensive firearm coaching required for cops who might face energetic shooters and different severe emergencies, the newspaper reported.
“I really feel unhealthy for the GW neighborhood, since you’ve been lied to,” Ryan Monteiro, a former campus sergeant, advised The Hatchet. “The arming program was a catastrophe. It was an absolute catastrophe.”
The college didn’t handle these issues in its announcement of Tate’s resignation Tuesday.
“I need to thank Chief Tate for his service to the college, and I’m grateful that Performing Chief Greenlee has agreed to serve GW on this capability,” Baxter Goodly, vp for security and operations, mentioned in a press release.
Ian Greenlee, a division captain who was not named in The Hatchet’s article, has been appointed performing police chief whereas GWU searches for Tate’s everlasting substitute.
The college’s board of trustees instructed the administration in 2023 to develop the gun program, in response to then-President Mark Wrighton.
“Whereas we aren’t conscious of any heightened menace to our college, lately there have been too many tragic situations of mass gun violence in communities and on school campuses,” he mentioned on the time in a neighborhood message.
Based on Wrighton, trustees cited the densely populated D.C. neighborhoods surrounding GWU and the necessity for having well-resourced law enforcement officials “who’re conversant in and immediately related to our neighborhood.”
“At any time when weapons are concerned, unarmed officers can not reply and should rely as a substitute on different armed legislation enforcement,” Wrighton mentioned.
However college students haven’t at all times had a very good relationship with GWU’s police.
Some pointed to issues of racial bias amongst school police departments, together with GWU’s. In 2020, shortly after the homicide of George Floyd by a police officer, the college’s Black Scholar Union mentioned Black college students typically had “adverse or frightful” experiences with the campus police division. The group known as on Tate to make departmental adjustments and forgo weapons in police responses to maintain Black folks at GWU protected.
Along with its foremost downtown campus, GWU maintains an auxiliary location in northern Washington and one in northern Virginia.
Whereas Washington’s violent crime has decreased dramatically over the previous decade, the nation’s capital nonetheless noticed 812 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2022, in response to FBI knowledge. That is a better per-capita fee than each state within the nation.
Nonetheless, the areas the place GWU’s Washington educating amenities are situated see much less violent crime than town’s common.
