Accord­ing to the April 20 arti­cle in the GW HATCHET by Sarah Scire, GW Uni­ver­sity Pres­i­dent Knapp will decide on arm­ing UPD by end of school year. While there is con­sid­er­able effort being put into focus groups as a basis for the deci­sion, the Vir­ginia Tech shoot­ing two years ago which occurred just before Knapp’s arrival at GW “affected his view of cam­pus secu­rity” Scire writes. Addi­tion­ally, Uni­ver­sity spokes­woman Tracy Schario wrote in an e-mail that

“the con­sid­er­a­tions in the report will not be depen­dent on pub­lic opin­ion alone.”

While stu­dents “who wish to weigh in on the dis­cus­sion” are pro­vided an email address to com­mu­ni­cate their opin­ions to the con­sul­tants jlwitt@gwu.edu, the FB com­mu­nity of res­i­dents and tax­pay­ers whose homes and busi­nesses are co-located with GW’s sprawl­ing facilities—GW is the largest pri­vate landowner in DC— we’re not. The com­mu­nity is left to bite its col­lec­tive lip while Knapp and GW make the unprece­dented deci­sion to “arm” what amounts to a cam­pus secu­rity force.

Today, we are talk­ing about mix­ing up the dynam­ics of an edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion in an urban set­ting with an increas­ing stu­dent pop­u­la­tion, a spike in crime–both petty and serious–and a methadone treat­ment clinic. The clinic—recently per­mit­ted to dou­ble its patient intake—is located on GW’s south­ern cam­pus bound­ary, in the midst of hun­dreds of pri­vate, off-campus res­i­dents and thou­sands of under­grad students.

The uni­ver­sity has been angling for nearly a decade to arm its secu­rity police and the community–along with the vast major­ity of GW students–has roundly and repeat­edly rejected the idea. We are not aware that the Mayor, Coun­cil Mem­bers and our MPD have sud­denly done an about-face on this issue. And while we agree that Vir­ginia Tech was a lam­en­ta­ble tragedy, we see no par­al­lel in that sit­u­a­tion that would jus­tify tram­pling on our community’s well con­sid­ered rights. —FBN Editor