Faculty leaders are urging officials to reassess oversight measures meant to safeguard the GW Police Department’s arming process after former officers’ reports of departmental gun safety hazards appeared to spark the chief’s resignation.
In the months following the Board of Trustees’ April 2023 decision to arm about 20 supervisory GWPD officers, officials unveiled two committees to bolster community engagement and oversight to the department and the arming rollout as students, faculty and staff opposed the decision through protests, letters and resolutions. But faculty in the groups said they have doubts about the scrupulousness of GWPD’s efforts to boost oversight and accountability related to arming as former officers’ concerns about the process went undisclosed to them and other members for almost a year.
Former GWPD officers told The Hatchet late last month that the department failed to register guns that the force’s top two officers carried on campus from Aug. 30, 2023, to Sept. 27, 2023, and lacked rigorous firearm training to prepare officers to respond to emergencies like an active shooter. Trustees cited growing national gun violence and shootings on college campuses as their primary rationale for arming officers.
The Hatchet’s reporting sparked the University to open an internal investigation into the allegations earlier this month, with GWPD Chief James Tate going on leave and officials retaining a third-party firm to examine GWPD’s existing training protocols and safety measures during the arming process. Four days after the announcement, officials announced Tuesday that Tate had resigned from his role effective immediately.
Months before the allegations surfaced, officials formed the Independent Review Committee in August 2023 to review incidents where a GWPD officer used their gun on duty to assess if the dispatch was consistent with GW’s Use of Force Policy and produce an annual public report recommending any departmental policy or procedural changes.
The seven members of the committee — composed of two staff, three faculty and two students — did not return multiple requests for comment on if they or the committee were aware of former officers’s reports. It is unclear how many times the committee has met since its formation.
The University also formed the Campus Safety Advisory Committee in April 2024 to increase the GW community’s awareness of and engagement on campus safety. Officials established the committee — composed of five students, five staff members, five faculty, one community member and six officials, including Vice President for Safety and Operations Baxter Goodly, who oversees GWPD, and interim GWPD Chief Ian Greenlee — after they collected community feedback about concerns surrounding the arming implementation via an online form.
But the CSAC didn’t meet until July, almost 11 months after GWPD commenced its first arming phase in late August 2023, and will meet for the second time Thursday. The committee’s first meeting was originally slated for April 25, coinciding with the first day of the pro-Palestinian encampment in University Yard.
The committee did not discuss arming in its first and only meeting so far, according to the July meeting minutes obtained by The Hatchet, despite officials announcing that the committee would review community members’s safety concerns as part of the University’s arming plan. The minutes state that members instead discussed their goals, including producing an annual CSAC report and possibly launching a community safety survey.
Goodly and Tate also both sat as nonvoting members on the Faculty Senate Standing Committee on Physical Facilities and Campus Safety, which is responsible for being available to the administration to “provide advice and counsel” on any matters surrounding physical facilities and campus safety, according to its website. In August 2023, as GW planned to roll out the first phase of the arming process, officials also said GWPD would make “additional efforts” to maintain campus relationships by “engaging” the Faculty Senate and Staff Council.
Goodly said officials are committed to “providing updates” and “engaging in dialogue” with the CSAC and the senate’s physical facilities committee but declined to comment on how officials have previously engaged the committees in discussions about arming.
Earlier this month, Goodly declined to say if the University informed the Independent Review Committee about the issues former officers raised in human resources reports and to officials and what oversight measures University officials have in place for safety policy violations. Goodly also declined to say if he or Tate presented any concerns raised by former officers about GWPD to the Faculty Senate’s physical facilities committee.
Goodly said the students, faculty, staff and others who serve on these committees provide “important perspectives” and advice that inform safety practices and enhancements for the University.
“I look forward to upcoming meetings with both committees, including a meeting with CSAC next week, as we continue our discussions about all aspects of campus safety and address any questions or concerns our students, faculty, staff and other stakeholders may have,” Goodly said.
Dwayne Kwaysee Wright, a member of the CSAC and a professor of higher education administration, said that after The Hatchet published its investigation, community members asked him if he and other committee members knew about the allegations, which he said they didn’t.
Wright said based on officials’s conversations during the committee’s first meeting in July, he does not believe the group will play a role in department oversight or operations and will instead broadly advise officials on GW’s safety initiatives — a “deviation” from how officials initially advertised the committee, he added.
“There seems to be a bit of a discrepancy, I would say, between what the community thinks we’re doing and what the administration, or at least the administrators that were part of our first meeting, actually have us doing,” Wright said. “And that sort of needs to be reconciled at some point.”
Eli McCarthy — a CSAC member, Faculty Senate physical facilities committee member and a professor of peace studies — said officials never informed either committee of the former officers’s reports before they were made public, despite former officers saying they first reported the violations through HR reports, meetings and emails to officials more than a year ago.
McCarthy said officials should halt GWPD’s arming, which officials said the department completed last month, and remove guns from campus while the third-party investigation is underway. He said officials should allow the CSAC to assess the investigation’s results to determine if GW should continue to arm its officers because The Hatchet’s reporting revealed a “pattern” of unsafe behavior.
“If this agency is generating a toxic work environment, fails to ensure adequate training for use of a lethal weapon, violates the law using unregistered guns and claims transparency and honesty while failing to be transparent and honest about significant shortcomings, then why would we trust them and enable them to carry lethal weapons on our campus?” McCarthy said.
McCarthy said at a Faculty Senate meeting earlier this month that Granberg seemed to be unaware of the departmental issues before The Hatchet’s reporting, which made him question why officials hadn’t probed the influx in turnover within GWPD. About 10 supervisory officers left the 50-officer department between April to August.
“Was the administration asking questions when there was a pattern of police, sounds like leaders, leaving the agency in a pretty small period of time?” McCarthy said. “Were they looking into that? Were they concerned about that?”
Guillermo Orti, a faculty senator and a professor of biology, said he is “satisfied” that officials have responded to former officers’s allegations by retaining a third-party firm to investigate the reports. Officials have “compartmentalized” GWPD’s issues, keeping all information inside the department and outside of the public’s knowledge, he said.
Orti and Patricia Hernandez, a faculty senator and professor of cellular and molecular biology, introduced a senate resolution earlier this month calling for a “thorough and independent investigation” into the quality and nature of GWPD officers, which would then be shared with the senate and trustees.
He said officials must make use of the University’s committees, which officials designed to protect campus safety. He said officials moving forward need to collaborate with the senate’s physical facilities committee to keep faculty informed about GWPD, which would allow faculty to advise officials on how to address any future issues.
He also said officials should also utilize the Independent Review Committee and CSAC for advice on campus safety concerns, given that they were intended to advise the department.
“They did nothing, then they formed this committee a year later, and it’s advisory and nobody knows anything and it’s all very nice and we’re all sitting around the table,” Orti said. “But zero information is flowing into this committee, so how can they provide advice or anything when a year later they know nothing?”
Scott White, a member of the senate’s physical facilities committee and the director of the College of Professional Studies’ cybersecurity program, said he plans to urge Goodly to keep the committee informed on the progress of the third-party investigation and share its results when the investigation ends.
White said he hopes the investigation’s final report will detail the oversight and accountability measures that GWPD had in place before and during the time that former officers’s made their allegations public and provide recommendations to officials on how the department can bolster oversight.
“What I hope, and I think most in the community would hope, is that the issues of oversight and accountability are again paramount to the rollout of this particular policy, arming of GW police officers,” White said.
