Brown Put DEI at the Center of Campus Safety. Then Came December 13

A decade of "values-led policing" collided with basic security gaps after the Barus and Holley shooting.

Brown’s Campus Safety Experiment Hit Reality at 4:05 p.m.

On December 13, Brown University became the latest elite campus to learn a brutal lesson: governance philosophies do not stop bullets. Two students were killed and nine were wounded in a shooting inside the Barus and Holley building. Investigators say the gunman—who killed himself yesterday—fled the campus on foot into the surrounding neighborhood. In the days after the shooting, the police had leaned heavily on off-campus residential and business footage because there were few surveillance cameras in and around the classroom building where the attack occurred.

While the Providence Police Department and the FBI continued the manhunt and broader investigation, the spotlight swung hard toward a question universities hate: what, exactly, has Brown been prioritizing in the name of campus safety?