The Evergreen State College is notoriously immune to the standard operating procedures that drive most colleges. It has programs instead of classes, evaluations instead of grades, and instead of a valiant bear or wild cat, it has a sick, giant phallus for a mascot. For all these quirks, there is one standard op Evergreen can’t ignore: preparing itself for a campus shooting.



A year after the April 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, Washington state passed Senate Substitute Bill 6328, requiring all four-year public colleges to assess and improve their emergency preparedness. The bill specifies that emergency response plans must include “policies, procedures, and programs for preventing and responding to violence.”



Although the bill doesn’t mention it explicitly, many colleges have included active shooter preparedness in their safety reviews, which are required by the legislation. Evergreen’s self-study paints a grim picture.



Evergreen’s Police Services report, titled “Active Shooter Response Plan,” notes that Evergreen cops, donning only pistols, would have to get within 10 to 15 meters of a shooter to fire accurately. On the other hand, with rifles they could make their money shot from more than 500 meters away. 



The report also cautions that it would take outside police agencies 15 to 25 minutes to respond to a distress call from Evergreen, which is located on the outskirts of West Olympia. It took Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, 23 minutes to kill 12 people; Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho took only 10 minutes to claim 31 lives.



That’s scary stuff and, according to Police Services, more than enough justification for “tactical training ... and access to rifles.” This request for rifles, although jarring to the Greener mind-set (my own included), is hardly out of the norm. All other Washington four-years with commissioned police have equipped their officers with rifles and active shooter training.

Fear vs. risk

The idea of being prepared is good, no doubt. And the idea of a shooter wreaking havoc on the Evergreen campus is bone-chilling. But here’s the thing: The statistical chance of having an active shooter on campus is very, very small. I mean infinitesimal. So what are the stakes of giving Evergreen’s campus police rifles when the fear outweighs the risk?

According to some members of the Police Services Community Review Board, or PSCRB, the body charged with making a recommendation about the rifle proposal, “a climate of fear” is a big part of the problem. Rejecting the request for rifles by a six to three vote, the PSCRB majority emphasizes that not only is Evergreen a remarkably safe campus, but that its most pressing safety issues are “sexual assault and natural disaster preparedness,” not gun violence — not by a long shot.



The majority opinion also points out that, although Police Services is banking on the fact that other schools have patrol rifles, “Evergreen is unique among Washington State four year institutions ... and it isn’t logical to compare us to them. We have a different mission, culture, student body, and means of operating.”



Before voting on the request for rifles and training, the PSCRB considered a number of viewpoints, which included listening to the powerful two cents of Evergreen’s Geoduck Student Union. In a public statement, the GSU recommended that the PSCRB “reject the ... spending proposal of $10,000 from the Student Affairs Equipment fund for the purchase of three rifles, ammunition ... and active shooter training.”



The GSU summarily rejected the “Active Shooter Response Plan,” reasoning that both the plan and the proposal to buy rifles “were written and produced by the administration and police services without input from ... the community.”



In their review process, the GSU conducted a student survey in which concerns about sexual assault and natural disasters outranked the risk of an active shooter. Along with an earthquake response plan and “a student organized (sic) escort service … to reduce the threat of sexual assault,” the GSU encouraged “preventative, non-violent means to deal with the unlikely problem of a campus shooter.”



Although the majority voters on the PSCRB largely agree with the GSU’s assessment, the minority opinion feels that armed preparation — no matter how unlikely the threat — is an absolute must. Recognizing the unhappy symbolism that rifles bring to the community, the minority opinion insists that “symbolism would not be a sufficient reason for not having been prepared” for an active shooter.

How the hippiest college in the Northwest became (almost) as armed as everyone else

The divide in the PSCRB represents a greater schism at Evergreen, one that has been growing and gaining complexity ever since the college traded in security officers for coppers 15 years ago. The pressure to beef up campus security came from the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, when it cited the college for “providing unsafe working conditions for its public safety officers.”



In response, Evergreen established standard operating procedures, or SOPs, prohibiting campus security officers from handling category 1 crimes, which include “homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping, rape, burglary ... prowler/suspicious person, domestic violence ... vehicle stops ... and all physical arrest situations.”



So campus security faced a nasty catch-22: their job was to protect people, but if they followed protection through to its logical conclusion — stepping up in the rare instance of on-campus assault — they broke SOPs.



With security officers relegated to campus escorts, Evergreen launched a campus safety study, and after two years of plumbing the depths of campus crime (which, for the last seven years has consisted mostly of drug use and theft), the board of trustees approved the establishment of a campus police force. But no guns for these cops, not yet.



The pressure to arm swelled in 1995 when Thurston County Undersheriff Neil McClanahan temporarily replaced Gary Russell as director of Public Safety (as Police Services was called in the gun-free days).  Asked to report on the department’s status and SOPs, McClanahan recommended full arming for all campus police officers.



Before responding to the recommendation, Vice President of Student Affairs Art Costantino unfurled the let’s-make-this-decision-together carpet: public forums, a campus-wide survey, and face time with students living in the dorms.



The survey showed that an ever so slight majority opposed arming. But, when you break down the numbers, out jumps an interesting discrepancy: 57.5 percent of students and 64.9 percent of faculty opposed arming while 79.3 percent of staff members favored it, creating what could be seen as a competition of interests.



Along with a bumpy seam muddying the statistics, some respondents felt the questions were oversimplified and manipulative. Staff member Veronica Barrera, quoted in a February 1996 Olympian article, said of survey questions, “If you answered that you would want to be helped if you were being raped, it made it seem like you were saying yes to guns.”



Drawing from a mixed community response, Costantino recommended that campus police should be allowed limited access to firearms. The board of trustees agreed and designated a Disappearing Task Force (that’s Evergreen for “committee”) to define “limited arming” and protocol for the use of firearms.



In 1997, the cops got their guns. In 2002, the Washington Federation of State Employees, the union that represents Evergreen’s police, requested a review of the limited arming policy. The PSCRB, now fully established, was charged with making a recommendation. And on trundled the community review wagon: public forums, campus-wide e-mails, public service announcements — but, conspicuously, no survey.



The PSCRB received a scant community response (partially because it neglected to conduct a real survey), which it nevertheless used to support its recommendation to extend the arming policy: 23 e-mails from community members in support of full arming, four e-mails opposed. That’s it: 27 e-mails from a community of more than 4,000 students alone. The PSCRB report didn’t even specify who the e-mails were from — students, faculty or staff.



The more influential input came from the Washington Federation of State Employees, a consultant from the Western Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, or WACLEA, and Costantino, who along with Police Chief Steve Huntsberry, “deemed full arming necessary on at least nine occasions.”



Democracy, ladies and gentlemen.

From pistols to rifles?

Evergreen approved the 2003 recommendation, and campus police are now able to carry firearms at all times — a victory for cops and their union, a point of contention for the greater community.



Six years later, the debate over increasing arms to include rifles revolves largely around Evergreen’s remote location and its lack of preventative preparation. Schools in central locations, such as UW Tacoma, can depend on speedy police help and have elaborate notification and lockdown procedures in case of an active shooter.



Because of its downtown location, UWT focuses on keeping up good communication with Tacoma PD rather than establishing its own commissioned police force. UWT safety officers are armed with pepper spray and batons, but Director of Safety Susan Wagshul-Golden says their essential function is to “act proactively to prevent crime” with educational and nonviolence programs, campus escorts and self-defense training.



UWT is a very secure place, says Wagshul-Golden, and its main priority is encouraging people to be informed, aware arbiters of their own safety — an avenue many Greeners feel should precede their school’s proposal to arm.



After 16 years of upping the security, Evergreen faces its biggest decision yet in the gun controversy: to join the 21st-century trend of rifle-armed schools, or to turn its energy toward fostering an egalitarian, self-policing community, factors that decrease the already minuscule chance of having a shooter on campus. 



The pressing question this time around is whether Evergreen will honor the democratic effort made by the PSCRB and GSU. Whereas the ’96 survey came back with ambiguous results and the ’02 arming effort got limited attention, the rifle survey rings out loud and clear: 66.8 percent of community members against the proposal, even with the majority of staff in favor.



The community has spoken, not only as a majority voice but as a chorus of those who are most invested in and affected by this decision. Now it’s up to VP Costantino, who will make a public decision either this quarter or next fall, to deliver the final say. Will he ride out the will of the community or bend under the pressure to be armed at all costs?