Photo: Law enforcement departments including the WA State Patrol, Olympia P.D. and Evergreen police officers gather with firefighter/emt’s for an active shooter police/fire training drill in C dorm on Weds., Jul. 23, 2014. The responders practiced approaching the scene safely before responding to a staged emergency with student actors.
By Forest Hunt
In 2017, President George Bridges quickly and quietly approved the purchase of AR-15 rifles for campus police, leaving the community to grapple with the implications after the fact. This is not the first time Evergreen has confronted the issue of campus police and AR-15 rifles.
Former Director of Police Services Ed Sorger requested rifles in fall of 2008, ushering in a full year of “forums, dialogues, recommendations, and responses from the Evergreen community,” according to a 2009 Cooper Point Journal article by Madeline Berman.
The amount of community involvement was notable compared to the recent decision from Bridges. There was “input from faculty meetings [and the] Geoduck Student Union”; an official resolution from the GSU; “two all-campus open forums, one staff forum”; emails across student, staff, and faculty listservs; a survey of students, staff, and faculties opinions; articles, research, and presentations by Police Services including multiple web pages, and a presentation from the state Attorney General’s office, according to the “Rifle Report” issued by the Police Services Community Review Board in Spring 2009. In the report, the Review Board established a timeline of events and made a recommendation to reject police services request for rifles.
This all culminated in a definitive decision in fall of 2009 by Vice President of Student Affairs Art Constantino to not arm campus police with rifles.
Campus participation in the more recent decision is starkly different. President Bridges approved the purchase of rifles in 2017 “without campus forums or surveys,” said Vice President of Finance and Operations John Carmichael.
Vice President of Public Relations Sandra Kaiser confirmed she did not know of any community consultation. Chair of the Faculty Agenda Committee Ken Tabutt confirmed the faculty had not been consulted.
Former Geoduck Student Union Representative Brandon Ellington said he had not been consulted. Students the Journal reached for comment had not heard of the decision prior to our initial reporting, with the exception of one student who noticed the rifles in a police vehicle.
In 2017 the Police Services Community Review Board, whose mission is to facilitate communication between the campus community and police services and review “specific complaints about police services”, was also not involved in the rifle decision. “I learned [about the decision] pretty much when everyone else learned,” said then-chair Kelly Brown.
All authority for decisions regarding The Evergreen State College rests with the Board of Trustees, who are appointed by the Governor. The Trustees delegate authority to the college President, who then further delegates to Vice Presidents, and so on.
“There was every effort to resist holding public forums, especially with students.”
Professor Emeritus Michael Vavrus.
In 2008-2009, decisions surrounding campus police were delegated to Vice President of Student Affairs Art Constantino, who has since retired. Constantino asked the Review Board to give him a recommendation which he could use in his final decision.
In 2017 President Bridges unilaterally made the decision to purchase rifles, according to Kaiser. Wendy Endress was Vice President Of Student Affairs when the decision was made, but was not involved. This year the authority to oversee police decisions has shifted hands to Vice President of Finance and Operations John Carmichael.
A History of the 2008-9 Rifle Proposal
The decision in 2008-9 was almost made as quickly and quietly as in 2017, if not for Professor Emeritus Michael Vavrus, who was on the Review Board during the 2008-9 academic year and said he managed to “stop the process” when the proposal was brought up at his first meeting on the Review Board. He mused the proposal would have passed had he not been there when it was brought up.
Former Police Director Ed Sorger and Sergeant Tim Marron made a presentation to the Review Board on Sep. 22, 2008, according to the Rifle Report.
At that meeting, Sorger and Marron attempted to get the Review Board, which had no student members and only one faculty member, to preemptively recommend Constantino purchase rifles, according to Vavrus. The Review Board’s Bylaws call for three voting student members, two voting faculty members, and three voting staff members.
One of the staff members of the Review Board and the school’s civil rights officer at the time, Nicole Ack, called the proposal a “no-brainer” and attempted to force a vote, according to Vavrus.
Student members Sky Cohen and Tasha Glen, who would join Review Board later, said voting staff member Andrea Seabert Olsen told them she supported passing the proposal “there and then,” according to reporting by Andrew Sernatinger for the (now defunct) Counter Point Journal.
Campus police presented the proposal as “necessary” because recent Washington State Senate Bill 6328 required it, according to Vavrus. When confronted with the actual text of the legislation, which only called for public universities in Washington to do a self-study on campus safety, Sorger backed down. “It was in black and white print, so they were caught in their lie,” Vavrus said.
Vavrus said Sorger was “totally deceitful,” and that the police gave “misleading information and actual false information” throughout the review process. “Basically, they made stuff up.”
Sorger then sent out an all-campus email on Oct. 22, 2008 requesting the purchase of rifles, according to the Rifle Report. This prompted former VP of Student Affairs Constantino to officially ask the Police Review Board for a recommendation on the proposal before he made his final decision.
The Review Board subsequently chose to engage in extensive community consultation prior to making a recommendation. Campus police opposed soliciting opinions from the campus, said Vavrus.
“There was every effort to resist holding public forums, especially with students,” Vavrus said.
Despite all the obfuscation, opposition from the campus community to the rifle proposal was clear and expansive.
A student during that time, Randall Hunt, emphasized that students intensely resisted the campaign by police to purchase rifles, and at one point “shut down the traffic to the campus for days.”
The Geoduck Student Union passed a resolution opposing the rifle proposal according to reporting from the Journal in 2009 and the Rifle Report. The Counter Point Journal reported that hundreds of students voiced opposition to the proposal in the two campus forums. Numerous students, staff, and faculty expressed concern in emails documented by Vavrus.
The Review Board conducted a survey of the communities opinion on the rifle proposal with 1242 community members participating: 66.8% of respondents were opposed and 33.2% in support. Students were 74.7% opposed and 25.3% in support, faculty were 59.1% opposed and 40.9% in support, and staff were 18.9% opposed and 81.1% in support.
According to reporting by the Counter Point Journal, Tasha Glen, a student member of the Police Review Board in 2008-9, said that Review Board staff member Andrea Seabert Olsen suggested censoring the survey results. Olson responded by saying she “always assumed [the survey] would go out.”
Only staff expressed support for the rifle proposal through their response to the survey. Vavrus provided a potential explanation for this. Sergeant Tim Marron “lobbied for the rifles” by posting flyers in areas “reserved for official campus announcements,” even while police opposed the solicitation of campus opinions on the rifle proposal, Vavrus said. He also added that Campus Police provided staff with intense active shooter trainings which left many of them feeling “freaked out.” The flyering and, in particular, the active shooter training amounted to “a propaganda campaign,” Vavrus said.
Stacy Brown requested mandatory yearly active shooter trainings for students, staff, and faculty on Aug. 1, 2017. Fifteen days later Bridges approved the proposal at the same time he approved the purchase of rifles.
On April 20, 2009 the Police Services Community Review Board voted to recommend a rejection of the police request for rifles. The committee cited a litany of reasons behind their recommendation. They said that active shooters are unlikely, that “the claim that campus is unsafe lacks validity and perpetuates a climate of fear,” that other safety issues like sexual assault are more important, and that community members feel police rifles will make campus less safe.
Furthermore, the Review Board stated rifles would increase police-campus tensions and “further oppression of marginalized groups,” the money could be better used “in a time of budget shortfalls, cutbacks, and layoffs,” the majority of the campus is opposed to the decision, the Attorney General’s Office made clear there were no liability issues, and arming the police with handguns was already controversial to begin with.
The Review Board also argued that arming police with rifles would further antagonize community members who feel their voices are not being heard and that Evergreen is very different from all the other public universities in Washington. The board stated the most likely active shooter scenario on campus would be at close quarters, a situation rifles would not help with.
On Oct. 14, 2009, former Vice President of Student Affairs Art Constantino concurred and made the final decision that the college would not purchase AR-15 rifles for campus police, according to reporting from Madeline Berman for the Journal. “The feelings of the campus were taken into consideration,” Constantino said regarding the decision.
Constantino further underlined that the Thurston County Sheriff has primary jurisdiction over Evergreen and requires at least four officers to respond to an active shooter, thus “a response to an active shooter on campus will require us to depend upon outside agencies regardless of the equipment at hand.”
What’s Going On Now
On Aug. 15, 2017, President Bridges approved the hiring of two additional campus police officers and additional police communication staff; as well as mandatory active shooter orientations for new students, staff, and faculty. The approval also included crowd control equipment such as OC-10 pepper spray and pepper balls, modernized radio infrastructure, door locking systems, and alarms. Additionally, Bridges gave the go-ahead to expand campus surveillance systems beyond the current 55 cameras, including the addition of cameras to Red Square and body cameras for officers after surveillance was “discussed more broadly on campus.”
Today, President Bridges is declining to comment on his police equipment decisions, instead directing questions to Allison Anderson, Evergreens Public Relations Manager. Anderson will neither confirm nor deny if any of the equipment listed above has been purchased and has declined to release any new statements on the matter. Instead, Anderson continues to release the same statement, which says Evergreen is committed to giving police services the “training, equipment and personnel they need to keep us safe.” She has declined to clarify what that means.
