Throughout the past year and despite the GW community’s objections, multiple officers in the GW Police Department have begun carrying guns since the Board of Trustees’ decision to arm part of the department in 2023. Officials like former interim University President Mark Wrighton and GWPD Chief James Tate said the decision was a response to heightened gun violence and recent school shootings and served as a measure that would ensure “specially trained” campus police were ready in the event of a severe emergency. Alongside the arming rollout, officials made a series of safety assurances to the GW community, like firearm and use of force training and two safety committees of students, faculty and staff to oversee the decision.
But last week — after a delayed arming process that included student protests, hundreds of calls from faculty urging GW to reverse the decision and frustrations from faculty senators — former GWPD officers said the “rigorous” arming training that we were promised wasn’t a reality.
Last year, The Hatchet’s editorial board said arming GWPD wasn’t the answer to gun violence. Months later, it called on trustees to better explain the arming decision after months of calls for more transparency. And this year, amid the claims from former officers of substandard firearm training, storage and registration procedures, the editorial board argues that officials must immediately halt arming officers, as the department appears currently unequipped to carry out their intended mission: keeping us safe.
Officials said GWPD finished its three-phase arming process last month and said 22 officers, or about a third of its department, would be armed after filling vacancies. But the department reportedly experienced a recent mass exodus of veteran officers, leaving three vacancies in the department’s top six positions and the departure of six sergeants within a two-month period. Amid this turnover, Tate declined to explain how vacancies would change operations for the arming rollout, leaving the community uncertain if those carrying firearms are as “distinguished and honorable” as once vowed.
One former officer alleged that only six or seven officers are currently armed, and another said it would take between 18 months to two years to hire and train new officers and pave the way for officials to complete the final phase of the rollout. GWPD mandates a “pre-arming period” for new hires to ensure “campus cultural fluency,” but we’d go a step further and ask officials to clarify who exactly is carrying guns on campus, and what their qualifications are, especially considering GWPD doesn’t publicize such information about their entire force online. No matter what courses are offered, instability shakes a community’s trust in a department’s personnel, so arming cannot persist unless there is clear evidence of efforts to rebuild connection and communication between armed officers and GWPD leadership with students, faculty and staff.
Tate said last year in May that the training for armed officers was going to include “extensive” requirements, from firearms qualifications three times a year, de-escalation training and simulator training once a month and implicit bias once per semester, as well as summer updates to the community. Those policies seem thorough, but according to former officers, it’s not enough. Out of an abundance of caution, officials should operate upon the assumption that when it comes to arming officers and their capabilities, more is always better. Former officers criticized the department’s reported reliance on GWPD’s virtual training simulator instead of real-world scenarios and deemed the required 56-hour firearms course insufficient for officers who could potentially be tasked with responding to a tragic threat like a mass shooter. GWPD must audit its training procedures using feedback from current and former staff and announce revisions that reassure the entire community — but, most of all, its own officers — that the department is prepared to respond to such threats.
Most concerningly, it’s unclear if the accountability measures that officials put in place to avoid a situation like this from happening were effective. The human resources reports that officers filed last year documenting these concerns didn’t appear to prompt a wide-scale University response, internal or public. GW has established two safety committees upon the arming decision — an independent review group that’s supposed to provide “additional review” and accountability on GWPD’s arming and the Campus Safety Advisory Committee that focuses on safety across GW — but the bodies never publicly flagged these issues, nor have they issued a formal response following the allegations. The GWPD website shows that officials conducted two internal investigations in 2023 and sustained one internal complaint, but it doesn’t state the reason that prompted the reviews or the result.
Groups that check and balance powerful entities like police forces cannot function if they aren’t given the transparency they require to hold the department accountable. We have to wonder: Were these concerning reports as surprising to these committees as the rest of the community? After Tate said in April that arming was “going well” and that GWPD “wanted to get it right,” the perception of arming from the force’s leaders seems miles apart from the concerns shared among its rank and file. The community deserves updates on GWPD’s corrective actions and mistakes, even if it slows the arming process or prompts a community “I told you so.”
The GW community was already apprehensive or downright opposed to the arming of GWPD due to a plethora of evidence-based concerns on the presence of guns escalating violence and police’s disproportionate harm on historically marginalized communities, like communities of color. Despite ceaseless calls from the community for more data and context on what backed the decision, officials have maintained the decision to arm officers was for the University’s safety, stating that “When weapons are involved, minutes matter.”
But officers who feel unprepared to use a firearm, even if they completed all required training, could prove to be more immediate threats to our safety than hypothetical horrific tragedies. When weapons are held by shaky hands, minutes matter, too. Irreversible mistakes can happen in seconds. If this prospect is even close to becoming a reality, the community is safer when officers aren’t armed.
These reports have broken the community’s trust in GWPD. And after months of demands for more evidence and communication on the arming decision that went relatively unanswered despite promises of transparency and accountability, the lack of confidence doesn’t feel all that surprising. We continue to question the rationale for arming, but no amount of protest seems enough to reverse the decision. So amid allegations that are sure to worsen an existing campus problem, the only solution is for officers to stop carrying guns until the department and its relationship with our campus can heal.
GWPD must immediately halt arming and take pronounced measures to earn back our trust before the department stops serving their stated purpose altogether: to protect and serve.
The editorial board consists of Hatchet staff members and operates separately from the newsroom. This week’s staff editorial was written by Opinions Editor Andrea Mendoza-Melchor based on discussions with Contributing Social Media Director Anaya Bhatt, Research Assistant Carly Cavanaugh, Culture Editor Nick Perkins and Sports Columnist Sydney Heise.
