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?
This is not a piece about the shooter or his motive. It is about institutional choices that were made in plain sight for years—and that now look like a blueprint for becoming a soft target.
The job description: policing, plus a values mandate
Brown’s top campus safety official is Rodney Chatman, the university’s vice president for public safety and emergency management and the leader of Brown’s public safety department.
When Brown announced Chatman’s appointment as the first vice president for campus safety in July 2021, the university framed the role not only as operational policing, but as a “community-facing project” shaped by national debates over policing and justice. The announcement emphasized that Chatman brought a community-focused approach, transparency and accountability, and a track record of “building strong relationships with campus community members, including and especially those from underrepresented groups.” It also highlighted his “forthright views on the need to address issues of bias in law enforcement.”
That is the heart of the argument that Chatman was, in effect, a values-first selection: Brown did not merely hire a police executive; it hired a public safety leader whose role was to “sustain a community in which students, faculty and staff are treated with respect and provided equal access to employment and educational resources in a setting defined by a commitment to well-being, safety and security.”
If you believe the primary failure mode of campus police is community distrust, this framework might be responsible. If you believe the primary failure at Brown is physical vulnerability—uncontrolled access, blind camera coverage, lagging alerts—then it looks like a campus-wide experiment that crowded out basic security.
The longer timeline: Brown’s safety apparatus absorbed DEI logic in 2016
To understand why this moment feels like a reckoning, rewind to 2016.
That year, Brown released its Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, a campus-wide strategic plan. Buried in the plan’s institutional commitments is a direct reference to the Department of Public Safety: expanding diversity and inclusion training for public safety was identified as part of the plan’s action items.
In other words, the DEI framework did not just live in academic departments or student life. It explicitly extended into the campus policing.
And it did not stop there. Brown’s own Public Safety and Emergency Management materials repeatedly highlight its diversity-oriented commitments as core to department identity and practice, including a formal commitment-to-diversity value statement.
The department also runs student listening sessions that tie police-community relations and campus safety programming to the university’s diversity and inclusion plan, inviting students to learn about that plan and provide feedback.
Put those pieces together and the institutional posture is clear: since 2016, Brown has treated campus security not as deterrence and rapid response, but as a domain for DEI-aligned governance—training, messaging, and community partnership structures meant to shape how policing is perceived and experienced.
The shooting exposed physical security gaps, not messaging gaps
What did the December 13 shooting reveal?
Start with surveillance. There were few cameras in the Barus and Holley building where the attack occurred, despite the campus having extensive camera coverage overall.
Then there is the siren issue. Brown’s outdoor siren system is designed to warn the campus community in life-threatening emergencies and instruct people to shelter in place, according to the university’s own description of the system. But Brown’s president said the siren system would not be activated for an active shooter situation, arguing it could send people rushing toward the danger zone.
Reasonable people can disagree about sirens. But notice what this debate implies: at the moment of maximum need, Brown’s emergency signaling tools were either not used or were viewed as ill-suited for the scenario they appear, on paper, to address.
These are operational questions—coverage, access, alerting doctrine. They are not solved by listening sessions.
Internal alarms were already sounding
This is not as if concerns appeared out of nowhere after the bloodshed.
In fall 2025, two campus police unions issued votes of no confidence in Chatman and department leadership, citing serious concerns about leadership direction and public safety.
Earlier in 2025 there were also complaints from officers about how leadership handled threats and safety operations.
Those votes do not prove any one policy caused the shooting. But they do show that, well before December 13, there were internal stakeholders warning that the department’s direction was unacceptable.
Universities often treat such warnings as labor noise. After this week, that posture looks less like prudence and more like denial.
The uncomfortable conclusion
If Brown wants to persuade anyone that it has learned from this, it should stop treating physical security as an embarrassment and start treating it as a duty. It requires acknowledging something campus administrators avoid saying out loud: a police department exists to deter violence and respond to violence—not to market itself as non-threatening.
Brown’s own public communications show that it deliberately embedded DEI priorities into campus policing beginning in 2016 and elevated a safety leader in 2021 whose selection was explicitly framed in terms of community engagement, underrepresented-group relationship-building, and bias-oriented policing reform.
That is a DEI-first model.
Whether that model contributed to underinvestment in cameras, access control, and emergency doctrine is a question an independent review should answer. But after December 13, one thing is already clear: an institution can spend a decade perfecting the language of safety and still fail miserably at the mechanics of safety.