On April 18, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan approved the Community Safety and Strengthening Act, the bill that will allow Johns Hopkins University to implement a private campus police force.
This follows significant pushback from many Hopkins students and faculty.
The irony of a private police force committed to protect students from outside crime while the university is under federal investigation for the mishandling of a gang rape at a Hopkins fraternity in 2014 is not lost on the students. Student protestors believe that the creation of a private police force is a feeble façade for insulating the campus from the “threat” of Baltimore city. At the same time, Hopkins is has repeatedly failed to manage sexual assault crimes within its own campus. The university needs to be held accountable for its handling of sexual assault crimes on campus before gaining the trust of students and staff to effectively manage a private police force.
Every year Hopkins publishes the Annual Security & Fire Safety Report in accordance with the Clery Act, which seeks to provide transparency about campus crime statistics. The 2017 report states that 11 sexual assaults took place in and around Hopkins campus. The statistic is footnoted. Tiny print at the bottom of the page reads: ““In 2017, the Counseling Center received 101 confidential reports of Sexual Assault.” Footnotes for the 2015 and 2016 statistics also reveal that there were much higher counts of confidential reports that didn’t make it into the official tables.
The report claims that information shared with confidential resources, including the Counseling Center, all campus ministries, and the Sexual Assault Resource Unit, cannot be used to initiate an investigation. It also states that reports of sexual assault are “considered on a case-by-case basis, depending on the facts of the case, when and where the incident occurred, when it was reported, and the amount information known to JHU Corporate Security.” Johns Hopkins University does not demonstrate this level of caution or scrutiny with other classifications of crime.
This past December, Hopkins’s Office of Institutional Equity announced that, between January 2016 and December 2018, a glitch on their website blocked 18 reports of sexual misconduct from being filed. Students reacted to this blatant act of carelessness with criticism and outrage. Then-director of the university’s Sexual Assault and Resource Unit, Bella Radant, told the JHU Newsletter that the incident was a case of “gross negligence”.
Don’t be too quick to chalk up the OIE mishandling as an innocent technical error.
On May 4, 2018, an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Anthropology Department, Juan Obarrio, allegedly assaulted a visiting graduate student in a public Baltimore bar. Witnesses claim to have seen Obarrio repeatedly attempt to flirt and dance with the girl at a post-conference event. According to Tweets from several witnesses, Obarrio grabbed the student and dragged her across the dance floor, frustrated by the student’s lack of interest. The Tweets also said that the graduate students were able to pull her from his grasp. The next day, Obarrio allegedly attempted to flirt with the same student.
The OIE determined that Obarrio’s behavior constituted sexual harassment, but not sexual assault. According to the petition that a coalition of Hopkins organizations created seeking to remove Obarrio’s tenure, the OIE also failed to reach out to witnesses in a timely manner and leads were not followed up for further investigation.
Additionally, the university did not make students and faculty aware of the incident.
This is one among many stories of OIE mismanaging cases, pushing deadlines for case decisions multiple times, and so on. Hopkins students have lost faith in the university’s ability to keep students safe and hold perpetrators accountable.
#JHToo is a coalition of student activists organizing against sexual violence on campus, and one of the organizations that spearheaded the protests against Obarrio. Today, students have hung signs reading #JHToo in the Hopkins administration building where students are protesting the private police via sit-in for the past month, to serve as a reminder to the university of the injustices students have faced within the bounds of the Homewood campus.
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