TOWERVIEW > FEBRUARY 2017 | VOL. 18 | ISSUE 4
Stephen Miller ’07 ‘A very young person in the White House on a power trip’
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Stephen Miller: From lacrosse fact to voter fraud fiction Rachel Chason and Gautam Hathi The Chronicle At the height of the Duke lacrosse case, Stephen Miller made a name for himself on national television defending facts. Ten years later, Miller—Trinity ’07 and now President Donald Trump’s senior policy adviser—finds himself being ridiculed by everyone from Joe Scarborough to Stephen Colbert for appearing last Sunday on morning news shows and repeatedly promoting widely debunked claims about voter fraud in New Hampshire. Even KC Johnson, the author of the “Durham-in-Wonderland” blog who called Miller “one of the heroes” of the 2006 lacrosse case, said Miller’s relationship with facts seems to have changed in the past decade—for the worse. “If in the spring of 2006, he were making the sorts of arguments that he made last week on the Sunday talk shows, his role in the case would have been utterly useless,” said Johnson, now a professor of history at Brooklyn College. “He would have been, if anything, a detriment to the players,” added Johnson. Miller did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article. While many in the media, as well as activists both on and off campus, rushed to condemn the lacrosse players who were accused of rape, Miller loudly insisted that they be presumed innocent until there was clear evidence to the contrary. “He began to speak up at a time when, to use a phrase that has suddenly become common, Mr. Nifong was dominating the airwaves with alternative facts,” said
Johnson, referring to the disbarred Durham district attorney who brought the case against the players. “There was a particular narrative about the case, all of which was simply false.” In April 2006, one month after Crystal Magnum—a local college student and stripper—falsely accused the players of rape, Miller went on HLN’s “The Nancy Grace Show” and rattled off a list of problems with the accusations against the players. “As the facts started to come out, there were many irregularities and inconsistencies that troubled me like many other people,” he said. At one point, Miller, then a senior at Duke, called Grace out for repeatedly referencing bruises on Magnum as evidence that she had been assaulted. Showing his attention to detail, he noted that the bruises had been photographed at 12:03 a.m.—before the alleged rape occurred. Miller also dismantled the accusations point by point in a series of detailed Chronicle columns. Fast-forward 10 years, however, and Miller does not seem to have that same attention to detail or that same insistence on the importance of facts. During appearances on Sunday morning talk shows on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, Miller repeatedly promoted widely debunked claims about voter fraud in New Hampshire, earning himself “four pinocchios” from The Washington Post’s fact checker. Johnson described it as “disappointing” to see Miller use his skills “to advance arguments and to present data that are divorced from reality.” Scarborough, the host of MSNBC’s
Chronicle File Photo Miller has been criticized by everyone from Joe Scarborough to Stephen Colbert for repeating debunked claims about voter fraud in New Hampshire.
“Morning Joe,” appeared dumbfounded as he described Miller’s weekend performances as “horrendous” and “an embarrassment.” Colbert mocked Miller, calling him a “liar” and challenging him to appear on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” so that he could call him a liar to his face. During his appearance on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, Miller said the “issue of bussing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics.” “It’s very real. It’s very serious,” he said. “This morning, on this show, is not the venue for me to lay out all the evidence.”
No evidence for this claim has ever been laid out, and several prominent Republicans in the state have unequivocally denied it. Miller did not stop there. He also made claims—again without evidence—about non-citizens and dead people threatening the integrity of the voter roles. These claims have also been debunked. “Just for the record, you have provided absolutely no evidence,” Stephanopoulos said. Miller’s response: “George, it is a fact, and you will not deny it.” See FICTION on Page 6
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‘People don’t want to see us, but they want us out here’ DUPD navigates tensions of private-public structure
Chronicle File Photo Like many campus police agencies across the country, DUPD functions as a private agency enforcing state law on campus.
Henry Chan The Chronicle It was two days before Thanksgiving and by 7 p.m., campus was deserted. Garry Husketh, a veteran of the Duke University Police Department and a Durham native, got into his patrol car to begin his night shift. He would be relieved at dawn. “I’d like to stress the fact that we’re here to help people,” he said. “Of course the job’s not always easy, but there’s a purpose for it.” Campus police are an intrinsic part of life at Duke—DUPD officers can be seen every day patrolling the quads, directing traffic and even keeping watch on the stretch of road between Shooter’s II and East Campus. And yet, for many students, DUPD is an unknown entity. “People don’t want to see us, but they want us out here somewhere,” Husketh said. For some, this presence—despite its vagueness—may be enough to guarantee peace of mind. However, campus policing has come under increased scrutiny in recent years, especially on issues like accountability, transparency and use of force. In light of these hard questions, The Chronicle met with administrators and police officers to better understand how DUPD works. Meet the Duke Police Like many campus police agencies across the nation, DUPD cannot be easily classified as either public or private. It is a statecommissioned police agency, but it is also funded and supervised by a private university. So who calls the shots? “[Duke] derives its legal ability to have a police entity on its campus from state law,” said Vice President for Administration Kyle Cavanaugh. “So the agency is then connected to the University, but it is the state law that governs it.” Duke’s administration oversees and funds DUPD, which is where Cavanaugh comes
in. He is the only person in the University administration who has a direct leadership role in relation to DUPD. But he noted that DUPD operates “very independently” and that he does not “intervene.” “My role is administrative—the analogy I would give is similar to the city manager,” Cavanaugh said. “You have a police agency, but then you have someone who has to do the things I get involved with—budget, technology, structural pieces for radios and 911 system, the physical plant and equipment issues.” He noted there are “checks and balances” to ensure DUPD complies with state law and that he works with Duke’s office of counsel or outside counsel if necessary. However, he did not specify what those “check and balances” were or say how they guarantee that DUPD is always in compliance with the law. The agency itself is led by Chief of Police John Dailey, who took over in 2009. Currently, he oversees 60 commissioned members, 70 security officers and about 30 support staff and dispatchers and reports to Cavanaugh. “We are charged with providing security and police services, and operationally, I’m responsible for that as the senior commissioned member of the department,” he said. DUPD obtained national accreditation in Spring 2016 from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, a private, nonprofit accrediting agency. CALEA has accredited roughly 1,000 law enforcement agencies out of the total 18,000 agencies nationwide, according to their data. Dailey emphasized that DUPD is first and foremost a law enforcement agency— its officers have the same powers as any municipal police officer, including the authority to make arrests and use force. This also means DUPD enforces the law, not university policy. “It’s really the University that comes up with policy decisions about sexual assault, alcohol and that sort of thing,” Dailey said. “Clearly there are laws about that, and we take
care of that. Policy issues are handled on the University side and are separate from us.” However, policy-making on campus policing can be fluid. Cavanaugh said that Duke is “fortunate” in that it does not have to work through rigid governance structures to make policy. For example, Cavanaugh said the implementation of a body camera program for officers was a collective decision that came out of a “partnership.” Dailey added that DUPD played a major role. “The decision about body cameras was something we considered when we saw what was going on nationally,” Dailey said. “There is a level of accountability, and our officers were extremely open to wearing body cameras. And then a student group also said they would like for us to have body cameras, so that was perfect. So in that case, that was something we sort of led.” Student groups are sometimes consulted to be part of DUPD’s decision-making, but this is an informal process and there is no official advisory body or platform. On its website, DUPD states that it “meets with student groups and leaders to discuss topics of concern.”
of the Campus Police Act. Under this law, only some information is publicly accessible. Not much disclosure is required for violations that do not end in arrest. But once an arrest is made, the level of disclosure goes up significantly—information about the person arrested and the circumstances of the arrest must be made public. “People have the misperception that records law entitles people to a police report—it does not. It entitles them to a couple pieces of information about the incident,” Dailey said. DUPD’s current policy is to only release the first page of an incident report in response to public requests. This page includes seven sections—incident data, methods, victim, others involved, property, officer identification and status. Information related to offenders is never listed on the first page, but beyond that, it is unclear what the rest of the report contains. See DUPD on Page 7
How transparent is DUPD? Transparency continues to be a hotly debated issue, and on that point, Dailey and Cavanaugh both emphasized that DUPD fully complies with the laws that require campus police agencies to disclose certain information to the public. The federal requirement comes from the Clery Act, which requires universities to enact security policies such as keeping a daily crime log, providing timely warnings of crimes and releasing an annual security report. On a day-to-day level, DUPD prepares and maintains the crime log and the security report. Both are regularly published online and available in hard copy at DUPD headquarters. Courtesy of Duke Photography North Carolina laws impose additional DUPD Chief John Dailey oversees a departrequirements which are stated in section 5.1 ment of more than 150 members.
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‘A very young person in the White House on a power trip’ Immigration ban architect Stephen Miller foreshadowed his policy on journey from Duke to the West Wing Rachel Chason and Gautam Hathi The Chronicle When Charlie Rose asked President Donald Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller, Trinity ’07, about the “chaos and turmoil” that followed Trump’s executive order halting immigration, Miller responded with a line that was representative of his entire political career. “If nobody’s disagreeing with what you’re doing, then you’re probably not doing anything that really matters in the scheme of things,” Miller told Rose, Trinity ’64 and Law ’68. Miller—an outspoken conservative activist since high school—has faced intense scrutiny for his role in drafting and implementing an executive order that includes a halt on immigration from seven predominantly-Muslim countries and indefinitely bans Syrian refugees. The scale and severity of the ban took many by surprise and triggered protests at airports nationwide. But Miller has vigorously defended the order, which he likely co-authored with Trump’s chief strategies Steve Bannon, according to several media reports. An immigration policy long in the making Miller’s path from Duke to Capitol Hill to the White House foreshadowed his actions in the Trump administration. On CBS’s “This Morning,” Miller framed the executive order as a way of stopping threats to the United States from those who did not “truly love and support the United States of America.” Miller also claimed Sunday during an interview on Fox News that the American people agreed with the goal of stopping people with harmful views—particularly radical Islamists—from entering the country.
“They are interested in what we are interested in, which is preventing terrorism from spreading its roots inside the United States of America,” he said. “If you look at recent terror attacks that have occurred in the United States, there’s almost always an immigration nexus, whether it be in the first generation or in the radicalized children of migrants.” Not everyone agrees with his opinion, however. A 2015 New York Times report cited a study by research center New America, which found that more people were killed in America since 9/11 by non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims. But Miller’s focus on the threat posed by immigration and by radical Islamic terrorism is not new—it reaches back to his time as a well-known conservative activist on Duke’s campus more than a decade ago. Miller and white nationalist Richard Spencer, a graduate student in Duke’s history department from 2005-07, collaborated on hosting an immigration policy debate in March 2007, according to two former members of the Duke Conservative Union. Spencer, who founded the National Policy Institute, has delivered a Nazi salute on camera and is credited with coining the term “alt-right.” He also made news on Inauguration Day when he was punched in the face during an on-camera interview. The debate between Peter Laufer, a University of Oregon professor and supporter of open borders, and Peter Brimelow, an immigration restrictionist, focused on whether America is in fact a nation of immigrants and the economic consequences of closing or opening the the U.S. border with Mexico. “My impression is that this was height of their collaboration,” said Bill English, Trinity ’03, who helped found DCU as
an undergraduate and was in graduate school with Spencer at the time of the debate. English added that he would not characterize Spencer as a mentor to Miller, although he did say that both himself and Spencer “periodically played advisory roles” in the DCU. It is now clear, English noted, that Spencer and Miller “had different sorts of critiques of immigration.” “[Spencer] certainly believes that some races are biologically superior to others with regard to intelligence, creativity, self-control and such,” said English, now a professor in the business school at Georgetown University. English said that neither he nor members of DCU, including Miller, embraced Spencer’s views “when he occasionally tipped his hand” about his beliefs. But Spencer told Mother Jones that he found it “funny” that so few people had picked up on the connection between him and Miller. “I knew him very well when I was at Duke,” Spencer said in the article. “But I am kind of glad no one’s talked about this because I don’t want to harm Trump.” Miller told Mother Jones that he had “absolutely no relationship” with Spencer and completely repudiated his views. Neither Miller nor Spencer responded to repeated requests for comment from The Chronicle. David Bitner, Trinity ’10, was a member of the Duke Conservative Union for two years and a friend of Miller’s, whom he affectionately referred to as “MillerTime”—the tagline Miller used in his columns for The Chronicle. Bitner—who called Miller “provocative and hilarious”—noted that he never heard Miller discuss banning immigration from specific countries and never heard him talk about refugees. “I don’t think that in terms of the
substance of the executive order there was any foreshadowing during Miller’s time at Duke,” Bitner said. He said the primary issue that he associates with Miller was the Duke lacrosse case, when Miller emerged early as a critic of the administration’s approach to the case and an advocate for the accusedplayers’ rights to due process. ‘Our enemy yearns to attack’ In addition to conservative political activism, Miller also wrote columns for The Chronicle, some of which reveal his interest in immigration and fighting terrorism through measures many would consider extreme. “Islamic terrorists have declared holy war on the United States,” Miller wrote in a 2006 column for The Chronicle titled “Unpatriotic Dissent.” “They have declared a death sentence on every man, woman and child living in this country.” He argued in the column that Americans—including Duke students— who criticized President George Bush’s policy in Iraq or expressed empathy for terrorists were “dissenting in a legal and protected fashion.” But that legal protection, he wrote, with a characteristic flourish for the dramatic, “cannot shield their hands from the possibility of someday being stained with the blood of the innocent Americans whose country they betrayed.” His analysis of the impact that immigration policy has on national security also stems back to his time at Duke. In another column, Miller drew links between illegal immigration, “political correctness” and the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. “We criticize our concerned officials for fear-mongering,” he wrote. “We oppose common-sense security measures. See POWER TRIP on Page 6
Image by Gautam Hathi | The Chronicle Miller, a senior advisor to Trump, has been interested in immigration policy since his time at Duke.
POWER TRIP from page 5 We give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. Meanwhile our enemy yearns to attack with all the force of Sept. 11 multiplied a hundred times. What will it take for us to understand?” Miller also implied in the same column that lax border security could lead to a weapon of mass destruction being unleashed inside in the United States. “Does anyone seriously believe that with our porous, undermanned, underfunded domestic security we can really hope to prevent the release of a WMD on our soil once terrorists get their hands on the necessary materials?” he asked. From Duke to the West Wing After his time at Duke, Miller’s focus on immigration intensified as he charted an unusual path to the White House. While working in the congressional office of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has been nominated by Trump to be attorney general, Miller created an “immigration handbook” full of talking points against a bipartisan immigration reform bill being considered by Congress. According to Politico, that handbook was essential in defeating the bill. “We had been working on the ideas in it for months, and Stephen put it in the handbook in a very quick time in a very cogent fashion,” Sessions told Politico. “It was very timely, and it impacted the outcome of the vote.” Looking at the common threads running through Miller’s career, it is not surprising that he was chosen to write and defend Trump’s order on immigration. Miller has appeared on network and cable TV shows a number of times during the past few days defending its rocky rollout.
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Some have suggested that Miller has been given too much free reign to implement his personal political agenda. North Carolina Rep. David Price, a Democrat, specifically singled out Trump’s political advisors for their focus on ideology instead of competent administration during a Monday event at Duke. “President Trump’s action shows the pitfalls of surrounding himself with amateur advisors, advisors who may be long on ideology but certainly are short on competence, short on experience, short on any sense of this country’s history and what we stand for,” Price said. “Amateur advisors who have no experience in government, no interest in making government work. They welcome the chaos.” Ideology vs. reality Those who knew Miller during his time at Duke say that even then, he was more interested in big ideas than the nuts and bolts of governance. Elliott Wolf, Trinity ’08 and former president of Duke Student Government, noted that Miller never held any significant leadership positions on campus. “I don’t think Stephen has ever been in a governing position,” Wolf said. “He was never the leader of the conservatives on campus, but a fringe fighter as head of the Students for Academic Freedom.” But Miller’s apparent prioritization of ideology over practicality may not survive the withering attack it is currently facing. On Monday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough lashed out at Miller on his show “Morning Joe.” Scarborough suggested that after a meteoric rise based on an immigrationfocused ideology, Miller may run into problems when his aggressive style and deep-seated ideology meets the reality of government.
“It was Stephen Miller sitting in the White House saying, ‘We’re not going to go to the other agencies, we’re not going to talk to the lawyers. We’re going to do this all alone,’” Scarborough said about Miller’s role in pushing the executive order. “You’ve got a very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your cabinet agencies to go to hell.”
FICTION from page 3 For those who were present during the heat of the lacrosse case, the difference between Miller’s use of facts then as compared to now is impossible to miss. Elliott Wolf, who was president of Duke Student Government in the immediate aftermath of the lacrosse scandal, remembered Miller’s use of evidence as “thought-out and strategic”, even though Wolf noted he never agreed with Miller’s politics. “There were times that I rooted for Stephen, particularly when he appeared on Nancy Grace,” said Wolf, Trinity ’08. “He intelligently articulated the need to not rush to judgment and [to] presume the innocence of the players.” Johnson speculated that rather than impressing upon him the importance of facts in a highly-charged situation, the lacrosse case may have given Miller the opportunity to relish an ideological fight. “Maybe he’s changed to some extent that he’s emphasizing more just the ideological side of things and less the grounding,” Johnson said. Wolf added that Miller may have been using the lacrosse situation as a way to advance his ideological arguments, noting that he “politicized the situation as much as he could.” “I felt Stephen’s goal was to use the
situation in service of his larger argument, that conservative voices were marginalized on campus and that ‘good people’ were under threat from ‘liberals,’” Wolf said. Miller’s apparent placement of ideology before facts stands in contrast to his criticism of the “Group of 88”—a group of faculty members who signed an advertisement in The Chronicle which some saw as rushing to judgement in the case—for doing the same. “You have a situation where, on the one hand [the Group of 88] realized that there’s absolutely no foundation for anything they did, but on the other hand they’re not going to confront the flaws of their own radical and divisive ideology,” Miller said during a January 2007 appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor.” “It was always for them about their political agenda.” Wolf and Johnson also surmised that Miller may be simply changing his tactics to adapt to his new audience. At Duke, Miller was in the midst of a largely liberal student body and academics. Now, his audience is the general public— and in particular a group of voters who distrust journalists and fact-checkers. “I posit that his current audience doesn’t have the same grounding in reality as his audience at Duke,” Wolf explained. “Living within the facts could be a handicap when speaking to them. From my experience with Stephen, if he’s saying something, it is a tactic to serve a broader, well-thoughtout goal. So my guess is that he changed his tactics to suit his audience, as opposed to went off the rails.” Johnson echoed Wolf’s conclusions, noting that Miller is “operating in an environment where facts just seem to matter a whole lot less.” Wolf noted that whatever his motives are, Miller’s actions so far have paid off. “I have to give him credit as a tactician,” Wolf said. “He may now be the most powerful Duke alum on Earth.”
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2001 Campus Dr., Durham, NC I nasher.duke.edu/abney Nina Chanel Abney, Untitled (FUCK T*E *OP) (detail), 2014. Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 108 inches (182.88 × 274.32 cm). Collection of Kamaal Fareed.
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DUPD from page 4 If an arrest occurs, the public can request a separate arrest report in addition to the incident report. Again, this is a single page— it includes information about the arrestee, the arrest, vehicles, bond, drugs at the time of arrest, complainant and narrative. Cavanaugh noted that Duke administration is not involved in the keeping or releasing of DUPD records, but it “ensures that the police agency is following what is required under state law.” When asked about his involvement in DUPD’s handling of the case in which Executive Vice President Tallman Trask hit a contract employee named Shelvia Underwood with his car last year, Cavanaugh said it was “zero.” For this article, The Chronicle on multiple occasions was able to obtain incident and arrest reports within one business day of the request at no cost. In the reports obtained, some of the fields were left blank, and redactions of information such as the home addresses of officers were made. Some of The Chronicle’s requests for reports were previously denied, even though the incidents were recorded in the daily crime log. For instance, underage consumption is logged frequently and is in violation of state law, but no reports are publicly available. The explanation given by the University was that the reports were filed by other Duke departments, such as the Office of Student Conduct. “Functionally we do pretty much the exact same thing as any city police department would do. It’s just that our so-called records law are not called ‘public’ records law,” said Sara-Jane Raines, DUPD assistant chief of support services. “Functionally it’s the same, except we’re allowed to protect student information.” Frayda Bluestein and Jeff Welty, both professors of public law and government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, largely agreed with Raines after inspecting the reports obtained. “For what it’s worth, what Duke has given [The Chronicle] is similar to what you might get from Durham Police Department if you asked Durham PD for records relating to a specific incident,” Welty wrote in an email. However, Bluestein and Jonathan Jones— instructor at Elon University and Director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition—both agreed that sections of the police report for the traffic incident in August 2014 involving Trask did not fulfill DUPD’s public records requirements. In that case, Bluestein and Jones noted that the first page of the report, which DUPD released, did not contain an adequate description of the incident, which public records require be made public.
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In addition, Welty noted that DUPD’s handling of the Trask incident raised questions about a conflict of interest, since DUPD reports to Trask through Cavanaugh. “I don’t know of a system by which they would analyze [potential conflicts of interest], but I think it’s a legitimate question,” he said in a 2016 interview with The Chronicle. The state laws on campus police records were passed in 2013 partly as a result of a lawsuit. In that case, a student sued Elon University for records, arguing that campus police agencies should be subject to public records laws since they have powers similar to a public police department. In the end, Elon won the case, but there was widespread support for amending the Campus Police Act. The current section 5.1 is a result of that legislative amendment. Dailey confirmed that Duke, along with other private universities in North Carolina, was involved in shaping the amendment and getting it passed. Leo Daughtry and Stephen Ross, members of the North Carolina General Assembly and primary sponsors of the bill, did not respond to requests for comment. North Carolina is one of few states in which campus police agencies are subject to a records law. However, in other states, some universities voluntarily disclose information even when there is no legal obligation to do so. For example, Harvard University maintains a more detailed crime log with exact addresses of incident locations and more detailed descriptions of incidents. Yale University publishes the general orders— the internal operational guidelines—of its police department, including its use of force policies. Brown University releases statistical data on field stops and citizen complaints. Currently DUPD does not adopt any of these practices. When asked whether Duke administration is pushing for greater transparency in campus policing, Cavanaugh did not make a firm commitment. “We’re at an interesting point in time nationally on this topic,” he said. “We have a responsibility to ensure that our policing agency is not only following the letter of the law, which we believe they do, but also there’s always this balance of a number of different competing priorities, from the curiosity of the public, to protecting the rights of victims and ensuring the integrity of the investigative process.” DUPD and the community Any conversation on campus policing inevitably brings up the issue of implicit bias, and at Duke, criticisms about bias in policing operations, especially on the grounds of race, have almost become a yearly fixture. In March 2016, DUPD came under
Chronicle File Photo Police Chief John Dailey pointed out that DUPD officers all recieve implict bias training as part of their job.
fire for how it handled the traffic incident involving Trask. In response, Duke Students and Workers in Solidarity called for—and continues to call for—an independent, external review of DUPD. In April 2015, then-chair of the sociology department Eduardo BonillaSilva spoke about a “climate of hostility,” which included people of color being asked for identification by DUPD officers. Bonilla-Silva is on leave and declined to comment. In April 2014, students met with administrators and DUPD to address concerns raised by students of color. This meeting was in the immediate aftermath of DUPD officers pepper-spraying a Durham resident at the West Campus bus stop. Reports of similar meetings go back a decade, if not more. Dailey vigorously defended DUPD’s record and pointed to the professional training received by officers. “Everybody’s implicitly biased—it’s part of being human,” Dailey said. “Several years ago, we recognized it is important that all of us understand [...] what we might do to have the interactions be as respectful and dignified as they can. So that’s why we started working with [the Office of Institutional Equity] around implicit bias.” Dailey noted that DUPD is 50 percent people of color and that officers are exposed to a wide range of people in the line of duty, which he believes can fight bias. He also said DUPD hires a consulting group to evaluate officers’ emotional intelligence in categories such as empathy, social responsibility and reality testing. Ben Reese, vice president for institutional equity and head of OIE, has led DUPD’s implicit bias training for nearly 20 years. The program, designed by Reese, includes psychological theory, academic research and simulations involving videos and professional actors. Raines worked closely with OIE in coordinating implicit bias training, and she detailed instances in which OIE brought in outside experts to teach techniques such as “verbal judo” and de-escalation. “At Duke, we started the conversation about officers and implicit bias. While the Ferguson stuff was going on, we were getting that training from OIE,” Raines said. “So it wasn’t like we were reacting to events, we were actually trying to be proactive.” In the past three months, The Chronicle has reached out to students, faculty and staff in an attempt to gauge the Duke community’s opinion toward DUPD officers. The vast majority did not respond or had no comment. Those who responded mostly agreed that DUPD officers were polite, efficient and helpful. Most respondents were satisfied with DUPD, and although The Chronicle has heard accounts of complaints, we were unable to verify any of them despite extensive efforts. Raines said DUPD receives “very few” citizen complaints and has an internal review system, set up in accordance with Duke rules, to assess officers’ performances. To keep officers accountable, DUPD primarily relies on the body cameras worn by every officer, and footage from those cameras are randomly reviewed. Although OIE provides training, it does not separately collect data on officer performance. “Pretty much every encounter we have is on video,” Dailey said. Raines noted that all stops are tracked and said DUPD has been “very pleased” that officers do not seem to be “enacting any implicit bias in their stops.” Video footage from DUPD’s body and dashboard cameras are not made public in order to “protect community members’ privacy,” Cavanaugh previously explained. However, according to state law, any person depicted in a video can request to see the relevant parts. Senior Tiana Horn, president of the Black Student Alliance, wrote in an email that
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Courtesy of Duke Photography VP of Administration Kyle Cavanaugh oversees DUPD.
BSA worked with DUPD on controversial policies in the past—most notably in 2014 when Marcus Benning was president—but currently does not have a stance on DUPD. In response to Dailey’s comments on implicit bias, Horn said they were “pretty in line with what [DUPD] reported at President’s Council of Black Affairs meetings.” Junior Elizabeth Barahona, president of Mi Gente, did not express an official stance on behalf of the group. Lara Haft, a senior who was involved in the Allen Building sit-in earlier this year, criticized implicit bias training as a “band-aid solution,” and alleged that DUPD has a “history of anti-black racism” directed toward Durham residents. She argued that the private nature of a campus police agency predisposes it to protect university property over the community’s safety. Responding to past controversies, Reese said that “any interaction where an individual has a concern with the police department should be fully and deeply examined.” But he noted that the community’s response may be influenced by other incidents involving race. “I think some people may lump what is happening across the country with a campus police officer,” Reese said. “As a psychologist, I understand that process, but I think it is unfortunate for the community and the police officer.” Dailey emphasized that DUPD officers enjoy working with the Duke community. “I think that’s one of the special things about this department,” he said. “We do have a large group of folks that really do care about people, and that reflects in their dedication to the work they do every day.” East Campus, Tuesday 9:30 p.m. Two hours into his patrol, Husketh was mostly closing doors. When card-controlled doors are left open, DUPD gets an alert and sends patrolling officers to close them. The score thus far was DUPD three, doors zero. It was a slow night. The patrol car arrived near the East Campus bus stop and was approached by a security officer and a middle-aged woman. Apparently, the woman was lost and had asked for help. Her speech was slurred, and she appeared confused. Husketh checked her ID and asked where she lived, but the location was outside DUPD jurisdiction, so he called the Durham Police Department to see if they could help. In the end, he decided to bring her to headquarters and then figure out how to get her home. “She’s there, [with a] speech problem, and not dressed for this weather. It’s a good 15 miles. We need to take her to meet an officer, and take it from there—we’ll make it happen some way,” Husketh said, as we sped toward the station in the dark. “This is one of many things people don’t see,” he added. “This is what we do.”
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