Dear Members of the GW Community:
Last fall I commissioned an investigation into issues relating to the implementation of the decision by the Board of Trustees to partially arm the GW Police Department (GWPD). The investigation was led by Timothy Heaphy, a partner at the law firm Willkie Farr and the former general counsel for the University of Virginia, under the supervision of Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff Scott Mory.
This investigation focused on the following questions:
- What is the validity of the issues raised in 2023 relating to the registration, carrying, and storage of guns, and compliance with training programs?
- Are GW’s current procedures and training programs for officers who are carrying arms compliant with applicable legal requirements and reflective of best practices?
- What policy and process changes would assist GWPD, and other units, in achieving a greater level of GW community safety?
In his summary of findings and recommendations, Mr. Heaphy concludes there were serious issues in the early implementation of the decision to arm GWPD. Since those early issues were identified, Mr. Heaphy confirmed that GWPD has been in compliance with all requirements regarding firearms and that the Office of Ethics, Compliance, and Risk independently tracks and verifies that compliance.
Mr. Heaphy was supported in his investigation by Chief Timothy Longo, University of Virginia’s Associate Vice President for Safety and Security and Chief of Police. Following his work on the investigation, Chief Longo developed a series of recommendations for the future of GWPD, which will be a useful tool for its leadership, including our next chief.
Before going further, I want to take this opportunity to thank the dedicated members of the GWPD for their service to our community. I know that for several years GWPD has persevered through dysfunction and demoralization. To the men and women of GWPD, the university’s leadership affirms your critical mission at GW and commits to providing the necessary training, equipment, and other resources to achieve it, and to recruiting the best possible next chief.
The GWPD investigation was conducted under privilege. Certain aspects of the findings, like those pertaining to personnel matters, will remain confidential. The Board of Trustees and the GW Cabinet have both been briefed by Mr. Heaphy. Select senior administrators have seen the full report and have been charged by me with responding to its recommendations. In the weeks ahead we will also arrange for Mr. Heaphy and Chief Longo to brief members of GWPD and the Campus Safety Advisory Committee on Chief Longo’s recommendations. With the committee’s advice and counsel, university leaders will consider implementation of their recommendations to improve not only GW’s arming program, but our community safety overall.
We have already adopted one of Chief Longo’s recommendations, which is to bring GWPD together with mission-aligned departments like Environmental Health & Safety, Emergency Management, GWorld, and the Office of Advocacy and Support under the supervision of a new associate vice president for campus safety. This will allow for a more comprehensive approach to community safety and for working closely with external partners. An announcement about this new organization and the search for the next chief of GWPD is forthcoming.
During Mr. Heaphy’s investigation, which included dozens of interviews and a review of hundreds of thousands of documents, he identified the common and consistent theme that university leadership failed to meaningfully and adequately engage faculty, staff, students, and other university stakeholders before and after the decision was made to arm GWPD. Failures to adequately engage the community undermined the community’s trust in the decision to arm and its implementation. Unfortunately, criticism of how the university leadership engages the community around important decisions is not new. The community, including the Board of Trustees, deserved better and for this, I am sorry.
Of all the lessons there are to be learned from this investigation, perhaps the most important is that GW leadership must get better at meaningfully and adequately engaging broader parts of the community when considering major institutional decisions such as arming. It is not always possible, nor wise, to collect campuswide feedback on every issue. But the level of engagement in this circumstance was clearly not sufficient.
Effective engagement with key university stakeholders helps leadership make better decisions. This has been a priority of mine since joining GW and one I will continue to emphasize. My colleagues in the administration share this commitment, and we will continue to incorporate engagement into planning and decision-making processes for all major university initiatives.
Importantly, engagement is not a guarantee all community members will agree with decisions made. But engagement does produce better thinking and better decision making. I have been personally gratified, for example, by the high quality of community engagement in the development of the university’s strategic framework, which has seen hundreds of individuals participate in town halls and submit ideas for consideration. That feedback has changed the thinking of the administration in important ways and will result in a stronger and more successful strategic plan.
My fellow Revs, the failures around the GWPD arming program offer us an important learning opportunity, and we will be a better, stronger community as a result. I thank you for your partnership in making that possible.
Sincerely,
Ellen M. Granberg
President