Less than 24 hours after five people were shot at Morgan State University last October, Sophia Joseph received an email that troubled her.

Her own school, American University, had alerted students that it was weighing new safety measures following the shooting at the Morgan campus, less than two hours away in Baltimore. One consideration was a proposal to arm its 37 campus police officers. 

“It really came out of nowhere,” says Joseph, then a sophomore, who later wrote an op-ed opposing the proposal for the campus paper. “Everyone I knew was definitely shocked.”

In the weeks that followed, the prospect of arming AU’s police officers prompted a quiet revolt on the 14,000-student campus. More than 120 faculty members signed a letter condemning the move, while student groups submitted their own petition, warning that rather than preventing violence on school grounds, placing guns in the hands of campus police could foment it.

“As I understand it, there have actually been several reported cases of racial profiling on AU’s campus,” says Angela J. Davis, a former director of D.C.’s public defender service and a professor at American’s law school. “Adding weapons to the mix could be catastrophic.” 

Eight months later, AU says it has yet to finalize a decision whether it will arm its police officers. University spokesperson Matthew Bennett says the school remains in the information-gathering and research phase. AU announced plans to hold “community forums” to gather staff and student input on the subject this fall, but Bennett says the university does not yet have a timeline outlining when guns could appear on campus. 

Bennett adds that the types of firearms officers may soon carry on school grounds is “not even part of the conversation yet.”

The tension at AU mirrors one felt on campuses across the nation as schools weigh student and faculty concerns about the threat of mass gun violence with the demands of an emergent movement, driven in many cases by college-age activists, to rein in police power and impunity. 

“What we have been finding in some of our preliminary research with students of color—with transgender nonbinary students—is that overwhelmingly, they do not feel comfort or at peace in the presence of police and often that produces both psychological harms and physiological responses,” says Charles H.F. Davis III, Ph.D., a University of Michigan professor who is also the founder and director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab. “Especially because colleges and universities overly rely on police to respond to situations for which armed officers are not required.”

University-employed police officers have been a standard feature on U.S. college campuses for more than a century, though their ranks expanded significantly following the student protest movements of the 1970s and ’80s, as well as the passage in 1990 of the Clery Act, which required schools to report yearly crime statistics to the Department of Justice.

A 2019 survey of private colleges and universities across the country, including AU, conducted by the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators found that 95 percent of the officers employed by those schools were armed. In the months that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, a number of campuses considered disarming or disbanding their police departments. But, successive years have seen a number of colleges and universities moving in the opposite direction, providing guns to previously unarmed officers in response to growing concerns about mass shootings. 

Last year, lawmakers in Rhode Island considered legislation that would have required all campus police in the state to be armed, and George Washington University, the largest campus in the nation’s capital, announced it would provide firearms to some of its officers in response to “too many tragic instances of mass gun violence in communities and on college campuses.” The decision was met with student-led demonstrations protesting the school’s new policy last year.

GWU is far from an outlier among D.C.-area universities. Campus police at Howard University, the University of the District of Columbia, George Mason University, and the University of Maryland all carry firearms and have the authority to make arrests.

As university police continue to expand their arsenals, Davis says they have a concurrent tendency to model themselves after nearby metropolitan departments in both appearance and practice.

“They’ve taken on more similarities than differences with municipal departments in terms of their function, in terms of their optics, the development of badges, uniforms, carrying of sidearms, but they also function in ways that are very similar,” he says. “They’re deployed often against political dissent that happens on the campus, mostly within the context of student activists, mainly student activists of color.”

While researchers say it’s understandable that schools looking to prevent mass shootings would turn to armed officers, they note that available data suggests the presence of armed officers does not prevent or deter such attacks—in fact, may make them deadlier. A 2021 study found shootings in both K-12 and collegiate settings were nearly three times as deadly when an armed school resource officer or campus security officer was present.

“What we found is the number one factor was the presence of a sort of AR-15 style assault weapon,” says James Densley, the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice chair at Metro State University in Minnesota who co-authored the study. “The number two predictor of a high body count was whether or not there was armed security on scene.”

Densley says there are a number of reasons why the presence of armed officers or security can increase the lethality of a shooting as more firearms are introduced to the scene when officers arrive, including police confusion regarding who the active shooter might be and a higher probability that students or staff may be struck by stray bullets. He adds that because most campus shootings are committed by students, armed officers are unlikely to intercept a would-be shooter. 

“These are individuals who are on campus day in, day out, are familiar with the security procedures, are familiar with the personnel on campus, and therefore are unlikely to be deterred by the presence of an armed officer because they know that they’re there,” Densley says. “Mass shooting is a final act, and so in many of the plans for these individuals, they are going to take their own lives or they’re going to have their lives taken for them by law enforcement. If you have armed security, it’s not that they’re a deterrent. It’s actually that they’re an incentive.”

Still, Paul Denton, a campus security consultant, says it’s difficult for him to imagine unarmed officers being able to effectively respond to the threat of a shooting. Ideally, he says, armed officers would be one component of a multifaceted campus safety plan that also includes security camera systems and behavioral assessment teams. But armed officers are vital, he stresses. 

“I’m a police practitioner,” says Denton, who spent nearly a decade as police chief at Ohio State University. “Technology is not going to be able to respond to the scene, check on an injured person, apply first aid measures, and physically apprehend a suspect.”

Yet, James McBride, a former chief of police and campus safety assessor, believes it is unwise to reflexively assume all university campuses would benefit from an armed police presence and advocated for what he called an “integrated approach” to security that actively involves students and faculty in campus safety efforts.

“Not every campus needs armed police,” McBride says. “It depends on the campus culture and the degree of danger determined by a qualified assessor. You have to have almost a community policing or community-wide approach inside your institution to be able to protect it from any of these threats or to deal with them effectively if a serious threat manifests.”

The key to any campus safety plan, McBride insists, is a culture of trust and cooperation—which even many law enforcement officials acknowledge is missing at many universities as campus officers search for ways to demonstrate productivity, leading to negative interactions with students and faculty. 

“There are a lot of departments that look for violations and want to write tickets and arrest people all the time,” says Gary Hill, police chief at Lincoln University, a historically Black campus in Jefferson City, Missouri. “So how do we do that? Well, writing tickets, stopping cars, making arrests. That shows proactivity.” 

In his experience interacting with university police, McBride says he found many officers to be amenable to an open communication with students, but these efforts are frequently stymied by school administrations looking to maintain the status quo.

“Transparency, I think, is critical and the willingness to meet and interact with the students, and there’s been a reluctance,” McBride says. “Administrators have to foster a culture of support for campus police leaders who want to take steps to try and solve these problems instead of ignoring their efforts or giving tongue-and-cheek support.”

Like Denton, McBride recommends that universities deploy a robust technological network to shore up campus safety, including a functioning blue light system—a patchwork of emergency telephones scattered across school grounds for students to contact university police. 

Although AU has blue light booths, Joseph says the phones on campus have repeatedly malfunctioned and administration has frequently been slow to respond to student concerns about the unreliable system.

At AU, where university officials still have yet to announce a final decision on whether to arm their police officers, students and faculty cite a number of incidents in recent years that have undermined trust in administrators and campus police. 

In 2019, protests erupted on campus after a Black undergraduate was forcibly removed from her dorm room by campus police officers during a mental health crisis. Journalism professor John Watson recalls an incident he witnessed several years ago during which campus police tackled and handcuffed a recent graduate who was playing pickup basketball with several faculty members and students. “Someone realized that there were a lot of people playing basketball and they did an ID check. So they came to this guy and he said that ‘my ID has expired,’ and they wrestled him to the ground and put him in handcuffs,” Watson says. “He was an AU student five, six weeks earlier, and suddenly, he’s a trespasser.” 

“For the most part, it looks like bored, pseudo security guards harassing students for petty marijuana smoking,” says Savannah-Rae Snyder, an undergraduate student at AU. “People get harassed all the time: ‘Take the hoodie off.’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Can I see your ID?’ Adding a gun to the mix is not going to make anybody feel better.”

Snyder is on the board of AU’s Black Student Union, which was one of a number of campus groups that vocally opposed the university’s move to arm officers before the campus’ activist energy was rerouted to efforts to combat Islamophobia and antisemitism as a byproduct of Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel and subsequent bombing campaign in Gaza. At least part of the reason the issue of armed campus officers has had less staying power, Snyder says, is that students are resigned to the belief that university officials are uninterested in responding to their concerns. 

“I think a lot of the apathy from the student body sentiment certainly just comes from AUPD. They are not active members of our community,” says Snyder, who adds she is not confident in the current training AU’s officers receive. “I’m not really depending on my school’s security officers to be able to stop a mass shooting. I have no faith that they would be able to do that even if they did have guns.”

This piece was reported in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop.