​Watching the watchmen

Over the course of the past few years, police departments across the U.S. have been brought under strict public scrutiny for racial profiling, militarization and excessive force that too often resulted in fatal encounters. Related to this shift in police-community relations is the news reported earlier this month of University EVP Tallman Trask’s hit and run with parking attendant Shelvia Underwood. DUPD was inappropriately unresponsive to Underwood’s requests for the release of the police report. Outside experts have claimed that DUPD and its state-commissioned officers may not have filled the report out thoroughly. We have also pointed out that Tallman Trask’s indirect supervision of the university police department poses a potential conflict of interests for such DUPD investigations. Many of the murkier parts of this case, including the legitimacy of DUPD’s mandate to release records and their oversight by Trask emanate from DUPD’s status as a private police force.

Across the country, 95 percent of college campuses operate their own law enforcement agencies with sworn police officers. These departments are often independent of local departments and their officers have full arrest powers and are usually armed. Although they operate in the same capacity as standard police departments, private university police departments often do not have to abide by the standards of transparency that other police departments do. In 44 states, campus departments have no obligation to release the same police records that non-private departments would have to release. Both courts and lawyers have objected to this double standard and argued that any police department endowed with the full powers of a law enforcement agency ought to maintain transparency. Campus police should not have it both ways. If a university wants to have its own police force separate from a municipality to give it flexibility or control over campus security and law enforcement, it ought to have it abide by the standards that other police departments do. Existing on a campus is a unique legal and cultural space for a police force to interface with its community.

We do recognize several advantages to having a police force present on campus. First, because of its location on campus, DUPD has much faster response times to incidents than Durham PD reasonably could. The presence of DUPD also stops the Durham police from being overwhelmed with the large number of cases that come out of campus, most of which deal with smaller crimes and require close cooperation with University departments and officials. Finally, having DUPD on campus as opposed to the Durham PD allows for small some infractions like underage drinking to be processed by Student Conduct instead of escalating to formal charges.

While we acknowledge there is a place for DUPD on campus, we believe that it is critical that the department be more transparent with records, as they are required to do so by the revised Campus Police Act. Although DUPD released part of Shelvia Underwood’s incident report, it took a protracted and unnecessary struggle to achieve that. Part of the reason that university police departments exist is to foster trust in students who may be skeptical of municipal or state departments, but opacity hinders that trust. We also call for a way, whether through complete independence of the force or the consultation of outside agencies, for investigations involving Duke University officials to take place without conflicts of interests. We appreciate our officers on campus but ask for courtesy and transparency from the bureaucracy, especially in cases like this that demand openness about their handling.