Read enough of the Department of Public Safety’s “Community Grams,” and the repetition may put you to sleep.
“On August 26, 2003 at approximately 11:45 p.m., two GU students reported being approached by an armed suspect … The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) was summoned, conducted a preliminary investigation and took a report.”
“On August 29, 2003 at approximately 1:04 a.m., a Georgetown student reported to DPS that she had been assaulted … The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) was summoned, conducted a preliminary investigation and took a report.”
“On September 7, 2003 at approximately 11:20 p.m., a Georgetown student reported to MPD that there had been a burglary at her residence … MPD conducted a preliminary investigation and took a report.”
These three alerts, the first three that DPS issued this semester, all involve crimes involving Georgetown students occurring in locations off campus property, yet within the neighborhoods in which students live, work and shop. These three crimes are among dozens occurring off-campus reported annually to the University. In 2002, according to statistics released earlier this month, 39 off-campus crimes were reported to DPS, mostly thefts and burglaries.
Though these crimes were committed against Georgetown students in areas frequented by Georgetown students, the University’s ability to protect its students outside of its property is strictly limited. DPS’ jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the campus security forces of every other university in the District extends only to the areas each university owns.
For Georgetown, this means DPS cannot formally patrol areas off campus that are not adjacent to University property, such as Burleith, except on a purely preventative basis. It cannot enforce District ordinances, such as the Noise Act, off campus. And, as the alerts above indicate, though students regularly summon DPS when they become victims of crime off campus, it does not investigate these crimes; the Metropolitan Police Department does.
But that situation may soon change. Right now, legislation that would allow the District’s campus security forces to enter into “cooperative agreements” with MPD to expand their powers is under consideration by the D.C. Council. It is the latest instance in a decade-long series of attempts to grant additional powers to campus police.
However, the opposition of several District universities threatens to kill the legislation once again, and Georgetown is among its most vocal opponents.
The proposal to create formal cooperative agreements between MPD and campus security forces is nothing new. Just ask acting DPS Director Darryl Harrison.
Before he joined DPS in 1999, Harrison spent 25 years as an MPD officer, including a stint as commander for the district including Georgetown. In the late 1980s, while serving in the department’s Special Operations Branch, he served as a liaison in talks on the issue between MPD and the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area, which represents the 14 colleges and universities in the District. Since then, Harrison said, the issue has risen and fallen on the whims of various MPD chiefs.
The latest push for cooperative agreements, however, has a more recent origin. Sally Kram, director of government relations for the Consortium, said that the latest talks began after passage of a federal law-the Clery Act-in 1998 that requires universities to compile statistics about off-campus crimes.
“It was that concept which got local security directors thinking,” Kram said. “Since we had to report crimes occurring proximate to campus as campus crimes, then it might make sense to formalize the arrangement.”
In 2000, the D.C. Council deliberated the Consortium’s first attempt to formalize agreements between MPD and campus security forces. After a series of hearings, the bill died in the Council’s Judiciary Committee.
Last year, with the start of a new two-year Council session, a new piece of legislation was introduced with the same basic purposes. This time, however, the proposal is part of a larger omnibus public safety bill, which is now under consideration. The legislation provides a number of points of cooperation between MPD and campus forces: sharing equipment, sharing radio frequencies, allowing campus police to process criminals, and most crucially, granting jurisdiction to university forces in areas adjacent to their campuses.
These sorts of agreements, known as “concurrent jurisdiction,” are not uncommon. In D.C., federal police departments such as National Park Police, Capitol Police, and Amtrak Police enjoy concurrent jurisdiction agreements under a 1997 D.C. law. Campus security forces across the country, both of public and private universities, are engaged in such agreements, and have been for years. To give an extreme example, the Yale University Police Department has concurrent jurisdiction over the entire city of New Haven, Conn., giving its officers the same powers as New Haven municipal police. Other agreements are in place at Tulane University in New Orleans, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
Closer to home, the University of Maryland Department of Public Safety has had a concurrent jurisdiction agreement with the Prince George’s County Police Department since the mid-1970s, according to Maj. Mark Sparks, the department’s chief of staff. The area that the university patrols is part of the Old Town neighborhood of College Park, Md., where several of the university’s fraternities and sororities are located and many other students live, Sparks said.
But universities within Washington have never been able to enter into the sort of agreement that the University of Maryland enjoys. Maryland state law provides for those sorts of agreements with campus police; District law never has.
When Dolores Stafford talks about these cooperative agreements, you can hear the frustration in her voice. As chair of the Consortium’s security directors’ group, she has led the cooperative agreements effort during the most recent push. As chief of the George Washington University Police Department, she represents the campus that needs cooperative agreements the most.
Where Georgetown University largely consists of Georgetown-owned buildings on a contiguous, Georgetown-owned campus, George Washington’s buildings lie on city streets-public property on which GWU police have limited powers.
Though the GWU police, like all other campus forces, can arrest criminals on public property if an officer witnesses a felony or a “probable cause” misdemeanor such as petty theft, they are forced to call MPD in all other cases. That can be a problem when the vast majority of a campus’ outdoor spaces are public property.
“If a person [on public property] refuses to turn their stereo down, we have to call MPD,” Stafford said. “We can ask the people to move along, and we do that informally, but we can’t enforce those statutes.”
Stafford finds opposition to the various cooperative jurisdiction proposals vexing since campus officers can already make felony arrests in limited circumstances. If a campus cop can arrest a mugger in action, she holds, why can’t he or she write a ticket? “It’s not a brand-new concept,” she said. “It’s just expanding the authority we’re already afforded.”
Stafford said the Consortium understands that different campuses have different needs, depending, for example, on the number of public streets that run through them. That is why the Consortium has advocated that these cooperative agreements be purely voluntary, she said.
“What we’ve asked for is permissive language that would allow each university to then assess their particular situation,” she said. “I think it’s good for the universities to have an option.”
Opposition from some community groups, however, has dogged Stafford and the Consortium. Public Citizen, Ralph Nader’s watchdog group, submitted testimony to the Council objecting to the lack of training standards and the possibility student information might be disclosed. Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2A, which includes the area surrounding GWU, opposed the legislation due to concerns that students arrested by the campus police would be subjected only to the campus justice system, and that concurrent jurisdiction would reduce MPD patrols in those areas.
Capt. Michael Jacobs, assistant commander for MPD’s Second District, which includes American, Georgetown, and George Washington universities and the University of the District of Columbia, anticipates no change in his department’s patrol patterns if concurrent jurisdiction agreements allowed expanded campus police patrols. “I would actually say that there would be overall more [police] presence,” said Jacobs. “We go where the need is.”
The bigger problem is that several of the District’s universities oppose cooperative agreements. After two rounds of hearings where the Consortium lobbied for the recent legislation, it withdrew its support after several of its member universities examined the legislation. The Consortium now maintains a neutral position.
Consortium president John Childers explained that if any of the Consortium member schools oppose a proposal, it cannot campaign for it. “Different campuses have different opinions,” Childers said. “The consortium can only operate on the basis of consensus.”
In May, shortly after the second round of hearings on the proposal, the general counsels of the Georgetown and the Catholic University of America sent a letter to judiciary committee chair Kathy Patterson asking that the concurrent jurisdiction legislation be eliminated from the omnibus bill to which it is attached.
“We feel the concerns raised by the public safety chiefs of our universities are grave enough to warrant the elimination of [the cooperative agreement legislation] in its entirety,” they wrote.
Among the concerns the letter cites is that even if cooperative agreements are voluntary, pressure from the community may force an agreement to take place. The letter refers specifically to the zoning process, outlining a scenario where zoning boards place participation in cooperative agreements as a mandatory condition for the approval of campus plans.
That is not an unlikely scenario-the proposal enjoys support among students who would welcome added off-campus security patrols, and neighbors who would relish stricter enforcement of noise and alcohol laws by campus officers in off-campus student houses. Last fall, both Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E, which represents the Georgetown area, and the GUSA Assembly passed resolutions in support of the cooperative agreements legislation.
DPS chief Harrison said the University’s opposition to cooperative agreements stems from a number of concerns, including funding, training and liability. “Although the bill appears on face to have some good points, the specifics … leave a great deal to be worked out,” he said. “It just has disadvantages to it that far outweigh the advantages to it for the University and for the department specifically.”
Kram said the liability issue created “a great deal of the conflict.” The text of the bill currently would hold the District liable for an officer’s action or inaction while acting under the authority of a cooperative agreement. According to Kram, lawyers from the Consortium’s member universities determined that language is flawed, and would require redrafting. Other debates have surrounded whether the District or the respective campuses would investigate allegations of campus police misconduct.
Harrison said the liability issue is intimately connected with the need for additional training. Though the current bill’s language mentions nothing of training standards, he anticipated that training standards would “increase dramatically, because they would have to.”
“You are actually getting involved in a municipal police department,” Harrison said. “That’s not to say that we shouldn’t look at ways to enhance our standards and look at ways to improve our officers’ professionalism.”
When a DPS officer is hired, he or she is initially sworn in as a “special police officer,” vested by MPD. If a special officer is not armed (as are DPS officers), no training is required. However, another category, “campus police officer,” requires its officers to have 250 hours of training, according to a member of MPD’s Security Officers Management Branch.
According to Harrison, officers’ contracts with the University require them to receive that additional training to become a “campus officer” within a year of hiring, barring extraordinary personal circumstances. DPS officers attend the Campus Public Safety Institute, a nine-week training seminar that the Consortium has run since 1991.
Stafford, however, said that campus officers’ current training is satisfactory. “We’re properly trained right now to deal with all the felonies and all the probable cause misdemeanors that we deal with on a weekly basis,” she said.
For Georgetown, the issue is further complicated by the fact DPS officers are not armed; entering a cooperative agreement may force DPS to arm its officers, voluntarily or not. To receive firearms certification, a campus officer must complete 60 hours of training. Harrison anticipates concerns from the officers’ union. “That would be an issue that the labor organization would rightfully want to raise,” he said. “I couldn’t understand them not raising it.”
Harrison said that the University’s concerns are based on its resources and priorities. “All of this comes down to the financial end, as far as the commitment to actually commit those types of resources,” he said.
Asked whether increased DPS patrols that might result from a cooperative agreement would affect crime statistics, Harrison expressed doubts. “Statistics are a hard way to judge to positive or negative effects [of off-campus patrols],” he said. “I think it has an effect on the way one perceives their well-being and their safety. That’s a much more beneficial gauge of one’s overall personal safety.”
Today, the latest and best hope for cooperation sits in the Judiciary Committee, part of the omnibus bill waiting for markup. It is unlikely the current language will stay; it may be reworked or cut entirely. According to committee staff, the committee will consider the bill late next month. No one involved with the bill, including Patterson, would comment on its prospects this time around. In a May article in the Washington Post, Patterson said the proposal would be “significantly redrafted.”
Stafford did express some hope, however, since MPD Chief Charles H. Ramsey spoke in support of the legislation to the Consortium. Kram also noted that the bill’s current language was introduced by the MPD, which she said is “clear evidence” of the department’s support.
“For the first time we have a police chief who sees the value in having the ability to have more people who are already police officers helping with all the crimes,” Stafford said, “not just the ones listed as felonies or probable cause misdemeanors.”
On a Saturday night last November, 20-year-old University of Maryland sophomore Brandon Malstrom attended a wild homecoming party, just three blocks from the College Park campus. The party was open-door, like many Georgetown parties, and later that night, two men, not Maryland students, crashed it. The hosts kicked them out. Outside, they found Malstrom, who was debating where to go next that night. The men harassed Malstrom, and then stabbed him to death.
In the aftermath of the murder, the University of Maryland and the Prince George’s County Police Department created a task force to examine security in the neighborhoods adjoining the university. Representatives from both police departments, the university administration and the student body collaborated on a set of recommendations, which extend from increasing bus services to improving lighting to expanding campus police jurisdiction to residential and commercial areas where students live and hang out.
In January, the university agreed to assume the added jurisdiction, which would require it to hire six new officers and spend an additional $375,000 per year. According to Sparks, the two departments are now finalizing the agreement.
Asked about why the university is expanding his department’s jurisdiction, Sparks said it was a matter of responsibility.
“The population of people affiliated with [the University of Maryland] has risen in dramatic numbers,” he said. “The institution felt an obligation to take some responsibility for the safety and security in those areas that are populated by the students.”
