Photo by Ali Meizels ’23
Smith restructures their campus police department.
In July of 2018, a call was placed to Smith College campus police regarding the presence of a black student on campus who “seemed out of place.” The student in question was a Smith sophomore working in a summer program designed to encourage high school girls to study and pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math. The incident made national news and sparked intense debate regarding Smith Campus Police practices and racial profiling.
In April of 2019, the Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges Campus Police Chief Daniel Hect was placed on paid administrative leave. Hect’s removal was preceded by student protests regarding his Twitter activity, which included liking one of President Trump’s tweets supporting the building of a U.S.-Mexico border wall.
In an attempt to address student concerns regarding campus police, Smith College embarked on a year-long revision process of its existing department.
One of the most significant changes to Smith’s campus police department is its independence from Mount Holyoke. The reason for this change, according to Smith College administrators, is to make Smith’s campus police department more community-oriented. In hopes of incorporating student feedback in its new policing, Smith hosted several listening and feedback sessions. The College also created the ad-hoc Campus Safety Advisory Group (CSAG). CSAG members include a combination of college administrators, staff and students. Throughout Smith’s campus police re-envisioning process, CSAG hosted three open forums, to which all members of the Smith community were invited. The advisory group also held 14 listening sessions with student organization and affinity groups and 30 campus stakeholder meetings.
According to a Feb. 18 letter to Smith community members, CSAG’s mission is to incorporate existing student concerns and create a more community-focused campus police department. Moving forward, Smith’s new campus police department will allow for more student involvement and utilize community-focused policing practices.
“[A community-focused] philosophy will be manifest[ed] through such practices as additional biking and walking shifts to reduce the presence of police cruisers; additional programing to build community engagement; and the creation of a community advisory committee with seats for students to work with the new department,” wrote ad-hoc Campus Safety Advisory Group Vice President for Finance and Administration Chair David DeSwert.
For CSAG Interim Vice President for Public Affairs Sam Masinter, student input played a significant role in shaping new departmental policy.
“We wanted to make sure that everyone had more than one opportunity — either publicly or anonymously — to weigh in on this,” Masinter said. “The first thing we heard was that they wanted a department that was more integrated into the community, that was seen as something more than law enforcement.”
“[Students] wanted more foot patrol, more officers on bikes, more officers coming to student events if they’re invited. [We are] moving away from the model of campus police sitting in a tinted-window cruiser somewhere off-campus,” he added.
The guiding principles of student involvement and transparency helped to direct many of the proposed changes to Smith’s campus police department.
“What we really wanted was to get a sense from our whole community about what we could do better to make our campus safety folks more integrated into the community,” Masinter said.
Student involvement with Smith campus police will continue after the one-year revision period. CSAG will continue to meet and address concerns of the Smith College community and students will play a role in hiring the college’s new full-time police chief. Meanwhile, Raymond LaBarre remains Mount Holyoke’s interim police chief. While there is no clear timeline for the hiring of the College’s full-time police chief, a Hiring Practices Task Force has been created to assist with the process.
In addition to changes to their police department, Smith has also implemented implicit bias training for its employees to help combat racial profiling.
“We do have mandatory implicit bias training for employees. We’re going to be looking at more training along those lines,” Masinter said. “Transparency is huge for us, we want to make sure that the entire [campus police] department is transparent to our students because I think that’s how we build trust.”