April 18, 2022

Dear Students, Staff, and Faculty,

I write to provide you with an update on the work that the Campus Safety Advisory Committee has done over the past year and on the Board of Trustees’ recent decision on one issue that the committee has been considering.

We established the Campus Safety Advisory Committee a year ago in response to student activism in support of changes in the role of ACPD, including a push to disarm and/or abolish an armed police department on campus. The committee has worked for nearly a year on a broad interpretation of what “safety” means to different members of the community and what would help Amherst become an environment in which everyone can feel safe. I want to thank the committee for their hard work. They released their report earlier today. I hope you will take the time to read it.

I also want to thank all of the students, particularly members of the Black Student Union and the Anti-Racism Advisory Group, who advocated so strongly for change. Your voices have already had an impact: over the course of the past year, we have moved several functions out of ACPD and into Student Affairs. Armed officers are no longer present in student residence halls or Valentine Dining Hall, except in emergencies or when there is no other available response.

As I made clear from the outset, a decision to fundamentally change our campus safety structure by abolishing or disarming the police lies with the Board of Trustees, which has fiduciary responsibility for the institution. Knowing that they would want their decision to be informed by the experiences and perspectives of students, staff, and faculty, I charged the Campus Safety Advisory Committee with conducting a broadly consultative process that provided members of the entire Amherst College community the opportunity to participate in deliberations about what constitutes safety and how best to ensure it for everyone on campus. The committee shared this input with the Board. Additionally, I arranged for the President’s Anti-Racism Student Advisory Group to meet with members of the Board last spring to share their experiences on campus with police and policing. That information had a significant impact: in deliberations at their April meeting a week ago, members of the Board directly cited what they had heard from students.

The committee submitted their report to me and the senior staff just ahead of the April meeting of the Board of Trustees (having requested and been granted an extension of the original deadline). The senior staff and I read the report and the materials and data on which it was based. We had thorough discussions, during which we took special note of the report’s breadth and its focus on sexual misconduct and student mental health. On both of those fronts, we have already begun to act, as many of you know. Before the end of the semester, we will provide more information about immediate or planned changes in both realms. 

We paid special attention to the data collected from a survey of students, staff, and faculty concerning attitudes toward ACPD, how safe or unsafe members of our community feel with ACPD, the positive and negative interactions they have had with ACPD, their opinions about disarming ACPD, and the comfort level with relying on the Town of Amherst Police Department for emergency situations.

It is clear from the survey results—and also through the many stories students have shared with me and others—that a significant number of people in our community feel decidedly unsafe in the presence of armed campus police officers. There is no question that their understandable sense of mistrust and fear, given the history of racism and anti-trans violence in policing, has to be addressed in a concerted and ongoing way.

We also reviewed information showing the number and kinds of interactions our campus police officers have with individuals on or near our campus who are not members of our community. It is evident from that data that legitimate threats to our safety happen more regularly than most of us are aware.

The question before the Board was relatively narrow in scope: whether the College should have an armed campus police department at all. After careful review of the committee’s report and materials, and after thoughtful discussion and deliberation, the Board voted to maintain a sworn, armed police department while also encouraging more efforts to define carefully their roles, as well as the roles of Community Service Officers (CSOs) and the Campus Safety Assistants (CSAs) housed in Student Affairs. The Board also endorsed our effort to reduce the number and presence on campus of armed officers. Their decision not to fully disarm was based on the following considerations:

  • Documented evidence tells us that individuals with criminal histories and weapons come onto our campus, given the porous nature of its boundaries. We also live with the sobering reality of a national environment in which gun ownership has skyrocketed in recent years, with instances of mass gun violence occurring far too frequently. We have an institutional obligation to consider the real possibility that an incident that puts the physical safety of people on our campus at risk could occur here. 
  • Relying on the Amherst Police Department is not a viable alternative. Not only does the survey indicate a strong sense from our community that APD would not be a satisfactory solution, were we to disarm our police department, but we also know that APD would face very real limits in their ability to get to know our campus and its buildings, as well as our community members, and to respond in the best possible way in a moment of crisis. More routinely, many of the incidents that are now sent by ACPD to be adjudicated by Student Affairs would be handled by APD and more frequently involve a legal process.
  • There are resources available to certified, sworn Massachusetts police officers that we would lose if we no longer met the state’s certification requirements. These include access to LEAPS (Law Enforcement Assistance Program Services) and CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services), which give our officers access to arrest warrants, criminal histories, restraining orders, and harassment prevention orders, among other tools, as well as to broadcast messages about crimes committed in the area in real-time.

    In addition, our campus police department would have no authority to detain suspicious people; enforce restraining orders or harassment prevention orders; enforce trespass orders; or confiscate and possess illegal items, such as drugs, fireworks, etc. (to mention just a few of the changes that would occur).
  • The Campus Safety Advisory Committee report did not recommend disarming the ACPD, but suggested evaluating whether weapons could be stored unless or until needed. Without any significant examples of places in the U.S. where this has been done successfully, we and the Board worry about the potentially lethal delay in retrieving a weapon if there were to be a life-threatening risk, including, but not only, an active shooter on campus. Seconds do matter. The best way to protect the campus in an immediate manner in the event of a serious threat is to have ACPD officers who carry weapons, but who would not be present in primarily student spaces such as residence halls and Val dining except in the case of an emergency.

Other aspects of the report are beyond the Board’s fiduciary responsibility and are left to be addressed by the administration and community members. The Board nevertheless shared their full endorsement of the critically important work of shifting the non-emergency safety functions out of ACPD and reducing the presence and role of ACPD on campus to very circumscribed situations. The committee’s report also endorses changes that have already been made, particularly the reallocation of responsibilities from ACPD to other staff members, reduced reliance on armed campus police officers for non-emergency responses, and finding ways to provide 24/7 services to our community in a way that does not depend solely on ACPD. While efforts have already begun in those areas, much more work is needed, with input from the community.

Mental health crises remain a critical area for which alternatives to police involvement need to be found. The Board supported my plan to bring in a group of outside experts to help us develop alternatives to having ACPD as the go-to response to such crises. The Riseling Group's team will include a former police officer, a college president who spent her career in Student Affairs leadership, and a physician, among other subject experts. I have asked the Campus Safety Advisory Committee to meet with this group of consultants so they can share what they have learned about responses to mental health crises. The outside expert group will also meet with a range of other campus constituencies before making recommendations on mental health initiatives.

With respect to campus safety, and based on the committee’s recommendations, here are additional steps we will take:

  • We will identify and communicate the spaces on campus where there will be no armed police officers except in the case of an emergency or when no other resource is available for any reason. 
  • As we continue to reallocate ACPD responsibilities, we will examine and assess the current structure and roles of the CSAs and CSOs to define their responsibilities more clearly, determine if changes need to be made, and make available all necessary additional training to ensure that they are as prepared and effective in their roles as possible.
  •  We will create a new campus safety advisory committee that will include students, faculty, staff, and subject matter experts, charged with advising ACPD and establishing communication among all of the stakeholders—and with the community—on an ongoing basis. A charge and this group’s composition will be determined soon.
  • We will explore the best and most viable models for offering 24/7 safety coverage and care with our current resources, as well as what might need to be added.
  • We will move routine transactions (e.g., picking up keys) out of Dispatch so that students do not have to enter the ACPD building to complete them.
  • We will enhance the training undertaken by all members of ACPD to ensure that they are continually learning best practices to critically examine stereotypes and cultural assumptions so that they might address the factors that affect the ability of some members of our community to feel safe in their presence. 

I want to reiterate my gratitude to the committee for taking a broad view of safety on our campus and for addressing the critical role sexual misconduct and mental health play in students’ experience of safety or the lack of it. As noted above, their recommendations in those areas will be incorporated into work that has already begun. In addition to the sexual misconduct review being conducted by Cozen O’Connor, we will have recommendations from The Riseling Group.

The College’s definition and model of campus safety have to evolve over time. I believe the model outlined here, when fully articulated and implemented, is best for our community at this point in time. The only way to build a safe community is to do it together. The senior team, the trustees, and I are committed to enlisting your help in that effort.

Sincerely,

Biddy