Did Hostility To Policing Contribute To Brown U. Failures?

Did Hostility To Policing Contribute To Brown U. Failures?

I appeared this morning on Fox and Friends, hosted by Griff Jenkins and Rachel Campos-Duffy, to talk about the Brown University shooting that murdered two students and left several wounded in light of campus political pressures.

(Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)

Campos-Duffy:

All right. This comes as American universities are under scrutiny about their security as the year caps off a very violent one on campuses across the country. So are these elite universities prepared for targeted violence?

Jenkins:

Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson joining us now. William, thank you for taking time. You just saw that wall of the incidents on campuses across America. Are universities prepared to deal with this?

WAJ:

Well, I don’t know if they are. This is obviously everybody’s worst nightmare. I teach on a college campus. This is something we worry about and needs to be taken very seriously.

The problem is a lot of colleges, and Brown also, are under enormous pressure not to cooperate with police, not to have surveillance cameras, not to have mask bans and those things. We need to understand what happened here in order to understand what can be done to remedy the problem. We need to under understand what happened here.

And unfortunately, Brown University and even the Providence Police have not been very forthcoming as to the role of surveillance cameras, the role of Providence being a sanctuary city and Brown also, which does not cooperate with ICE. We need to understand what went wrong here.

Campos-Duffy:

Yeah, absolutely. There’s so many questions around this Brown University incident, but by far the the most shocking traumatic, violent incident that happened on campus this year was what happened to Charlie Kirk. And I have to tell you that as a parent who has kids who went to very liberal universities and were conservatives and outcasts found themselves canceled, um, and in many ways harassed for their views, I’m not surprised that that happened to Charlie Kirk. And so yes, it’s about surveillance and, and you know, what, who’s on campus. There’s that aspect, but there’s a culture on, on these campuses as well that has to be addressed. Correct?

WAJ:

That’s right. I mean, obviously Charlie Kirk is the worst example that we’ve had of an assassination on campus, but it is a very hostile environment, particularly for conservatives.

There’s no indication so far that this Brown shooting was motivated by that, but there are all those pressures. And Brown in particular had very violent and very aggressive protests regarding, anti-Israel protests, and that’s kind of the background to all of this.

Jenkins:

Well, and drilling into that, William, just a little bit, obviously we don’t know the motive in the Brown shooting as you highlight, however, do you think it’s time to look nationwide and investigate whether or not ideological motives are behind making these campuses less secure?

WAJ:

Yeah, I think, I think we do need to look at that. The failure, the refusal of the Brown police to cooperate with the Rhode Island police surveillance system, their cameras are not hooked in to the Providence citywide surveillance system, is that an issue?

There has been pressure, again, on the issue of masks. A lot of the problems on campuses have come from masked students. And of course, we know this shooter was masked, which interfered with the ability to identify him. These are all ideological pressures that influence law enforcement on campuses and need to be addressed and investigated.

I would call on Attorney General Bondi to put together a task force to understand what happened at Brown, what could have been done differently, what their policies are with regard to cooperating with the police and with ICE, and whether that factored in. We need to understand what happened in order to come up with remedies.

Jenkins:

Well, hopefully, Brown University’s president is listening to you talk right now. She is said in initial comments at press conference she’s not thinking that anything needs to change. Clearly, you have a different opinion on that and, and nothing is more important than the safety of students at our college campuses. William Jacobson, thank you very much for taking time.

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