BY FOREST HUNT
Emails obtained by the Cooper Point Journal and subsequent investigation show Evergreen’s Police Services quietly purchased AR-15 semi-automatic rifles in 2017 without notifying the campus community.
On Aug. 1, 2017 then Director of Police Services Stacey Brown requested the purchase of AR-15 rifles for police services on campus in an email to College President George Bridges.
On August 15th, despite Brown’s subsequent resignation, Bridges granted her request. Two days later he approved new rifle procedures.
In one fell swoop, behind closed doors, Evergreen’s Police Services had achieved a goal it has been doggedly pursuing in the face of mass community opposition since at least 2008.
Brown’s email called for the purchase of five semi-automatic AR-15 rifles, projected to cost $12 thousand in total with a continuing upkeep of $1 thousand per year. Four of the rifles would be stored in patrol vehicles with the fifth residing in the station. However, Police Services Standard Operating Procedures allows all officers to use “personally owned” rifles in place of the ones issued to them, allowing for the potential of ten additional rifles if each officer used their own. The procedures also permit each on-duty patrol officer to carry a rifle in their vehicle, meaning that each police vehicle could have multiple rifles depending on the number of on-duty officers present.
The AR-15 rifle was developed in the 1950s for the United States Military. The rifles use .22 caliber rounds shot at high speeds which are intended to cause serious bodily harm at large distances.
Brown called for a plethora of changes, including additional officers, communication staff, and mandatory active shooter orientations for new students, faculty, and staff. She requested crowd control equipment including OC-10 pepper spray and pepper balls, modernized radio infrastructure, door locking systems, and alarms. Brown also asked to expand campus surveillance systems beyond the current 55 cameras, including the addition of cameras to Red Square and body cameras for officers.
In his brief response, Bridges agreed to seek funding for all these proposals in a supplemental budget request, his only conditions being that additional surveillance systems be “discussed more broadly on campus” and office requests be made to the campus “space committee.” Many of the requests lack budget estimations. Those that do include estimates add up to a one time cost of $21 thousand and an annual cost of $393 thousand.
In an email to the Journal, President Bridges asked Sandra Kaiser, Vice President of Public Relations, to speak on his behalf “regarding this decision” and the “concerns” that led to it. Despite Bridges’ request, Kaiser never explicitly spoke to details of the decision or external concerns that Bridges referenced.
Kaiser did say, “The decision making was by the President.” There was no indication of consultation with Wendy Endress, Vice President of Student Affairs who oversaw Police Services at the time.
When asked about consultation with the Board of Trustees regarding the decision, Kaiser said, “I’ll have to check into that.”
None of the publicly available minutes from board meetings over the past two years make any mention of purchasing rifles. The Board have played an integral role in arbitrating over police services continuing requests for rifles in the past.
Last year’s Police Community Review Board Chair, Dr. Kelly Brown said the Board was not consulted or involved in the decision to authorize police services to purchase rifles, which was confirmed by Vice President of Finance and Operations John Carmichael.
Dr. Brown was unavailable for further comment before press, and Carmichael flatly refused to offer an explanation as to why the Review Board was not consulted.
Carmichael, who Police Services presently reports to, spoke with surprising clarity to the secrecy of the rifle decision: “There weren’t campus forums or surveys for this decision,” Carmichael said.
When asked if there were any announcements, emails, pubic forums, polls, votes, or consultations with campus committees, unions, governance groups, including the Geoduck Student Union, Faculty Agenda Committee, or Staff governance structures, Kaiser answered, “Not that I know of.”
Brandon Ellington, a Representative of the Geoduck Student Union, confirmed he had not been consulted, saying, “I should have had at least one significant conversation with administrators about this decision. Like several major college initiatives, I feel quite left out.”
Steve Blakeslee, Chair of the Faculty Agenda Committee, confirmed, “The issue did not come before either the agenda committee or the faculty at large last year.”
Senior members of the administration fell back on several recurring themes to justify the decision during interviews: rifles are present at all public colleges across the state, campus would be safer from an active shooter if police had these arms, and, in the words of Carmichael, “We have come to a conclusion that if we are gonna have police on campus they are going to have police things.”
Kaiser invoked the events surrounding student protests of spring 2017, referring to “turmoil”, including the threat the college received from a New Jersey man which shut down the campus and lead to graduation being relocated at a cost of $100 thousand. While first acknowledging he knew it would make some feel unsafe, Carmichael said, “In some scenarios we were forced to contemplate last year, having police appropriately equipped with rifles is safer for the campus.”
Michael Vavrus, Professor Emeritus and former member of the Police Community Review Board, thinks the decision boiled down to something simpler. “I felt the police suffered from weapons envy,” he said. He added that the police’s rhetoric felt like it was out of the Wild West, with officers imagining themselves “coming in on their white horses and rescuing people”, and it felt like a “macho show.”
He also responded to the suggestion that the events of spring 2017 necessitated this response by pointing out the college has gone through much tenser situations in the past, particularly when graduates invited Mumia Abu-Jamal to be their commencement speaker in 1999. Abu-Jamal was convicted for killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1982.
“If anything was going to happen on our campus, that was the day, and nothing happened,” said Vavrus. “I remember when somebody got in a tower at the University of Texas 1966 and just started shooting on the campus […] colleges didn’t go and suddenly get rifles. There have been instances on colleges throughout the years where police being armed wouldn’t have changed the situation.”
Former Academic Budget Dean Ken Tubbutt did a back-of-a-napkin calculation in a 2009 email to faculty responding to an earlier rifle proposal, concluding that, “the probability of an event [involving a shooter] happening on a specific campus each year is P(x) = 0.0003 or once in every 3,140 years.”
“I am not implying that an event only happens every 3,140 years – there may very well be an active shooter on the same campus two years in a row, or even in the same year,” said Tubbett. “It is just an attempt to put the probability of these events in perspective.”
Sarah Boucher, a student, worried that perceptions of Evergreen students as “scary and crazy” after the 2017 protests may have played a part in the decision. “Are they for us, or are they for intruders?” she wondered.
Another student H.L. said, “It seems like these rifles were purchased in defense of Evergreen as an institution instead of in defense of the students.”
“The campus is a safer place than it was,” insisted Kaiser, Vice President of Public Relations. “I would say that we have really good law enforcement officers on campus. They’re very highly trained, they really care about the people on this campus.”
This stands in direct contradiction to the testimony of many community members who brought up instances of concerning behavior and misconduct on the part of Evergreen police. Kay Kovac, a student and former Resident Assistant, said police would “come in and stand there with their hands on their gun belts and just hover,” and that he was worried they might use their weapons.
Vavrus recounted that the officer in spring 2008 in charge of taser trainings “chased an inebriated student into the forest and tasered that student.” He also underlined a May 13, 2009 incident when Officer Brewster threatened to taser participants of a street theatre performance on campus “if it went too far.”
H.L. said, “As a person of color, I must say, yes, people of color are in particular risk of fatal injury when police are involved. Black and brown people endure the possibility of brutal force when police are present, full stop. These are officers at a seemingly progressive institution, but this does not absolve them from implicit biases regarding race which are so pervasive in our society.” They concluded, “You have to consider who’s the most vulnerable at Evergreen.” For these reasons, H.L. declined to give their name.
Several people pointed to the recent shooting of an unarmed black student at Portland State University and the efforts by students there to completely disarm their campus police. H.L. warned it’s possible for what happened in Portland to happen at Evergreen.
Officers with Police Services deferred comment to the college’s Public Relations department, which did not respond on their behalf in time for press.
Kaiser repeatedly answered pointed questions concerning procurement of rifles by deflecting to the Report of the Independent External Review Panel which assessed the college following campus protests in 2017 and declining enrollment.
While it did recommend campus wide active shooter trainings, increasing funding and “support” for police services, as well as “minimizing use of force,” the report did not contain any specific mention of rifles. It did, however, call on administrators to ensure the college “restores a sense of trust and transparency among campus constituencies” and increases “opportunities for campus-wide engagement with the issues.” It recommended “active in-person presence of leadership with the faculty, staff, and students” and “frank communication and bold leadership.”
The report warns that not implementing these changes risks “a deterioration of the fabric of the campus community, characterized by feelings of mistrust and exclusion from the administration.”
Webmaster’s note, [10/18/18, 2:10 p.m.]: A previous version of this article used incorrect pronouns for Kay Kovac.
