Johns Hopkins will pause development of a police department for at least two years – The Hub at Johns Hopkins

ByHub staff report

University and Medicine leaders announced today that Johns Hopkins will pause the development of a police department for at least two years so that it may benefit from the national re-evaluation of policing in society brought about by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

"We want Johns Hopkins to be part of the conversation about what is possible for our city and country in rethinking the appropriate boundaries and responsibilities of policing, and to draw on the energies, expertise, and efforts of our community in advancing the agenda for consequential and enduring reform. And we want to be able to work nowwith a sense of shared purpose and commitment, with our neighbors, and across our university communityto develop and model these alternative approaches," wrote Ronald J. Daniels, president of the university; Paul B. Rothman, dean of the medical faculty and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine; and Kevin W. Sowers, president of the Johns Hopkins Health System and executive vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Read the full message below.

Dear Faculty, Students, Staff, and Neighbors of Johns Hopkins:

As hundreds of thousands rise in protest here and across the nation, we share the continued anguish and anger at the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and the unjust loss of so many other Black lives, in the long and grotesque history of systemic racism that has shaped this nation and its institutions.

This moment of national reckoning implicates all areas of our lives and the work we do together as a learned community. We recognize the ways in which systemic racism impacts unfairly our Black and Brown colleagues, neighbors, students, and staff. We know we must do more as an institution and as individuals to fully realize Johns Hopkins' core commitment to justice, equity, and inclusion, and we are grateful for the many difficult and important conversations that are happening now and that will guide our efforts to listen, to support, and to act.

Today, we want to speak to the renewed questions and broad concerns about policing in America and the calls to reconsider our decision to create a university police department at Johns Hopkins.

We sought the legislative authorization to build this department because of the sustained surge in violent crime directly impacting our students, faculty, staff, and neighbors and because, in contrast to our public university peers in the city, we lacked a police department that could help protect them. In seeking this authorization, we embraced without reservation many of the reforms that are now being called for across the country and we hope that legislation can contribute to the wider discussion of the steps needed to realize lawful, nonracist, and publicly accountable sworn policing.

The legislation that was enacted responded in a detailed and comprehensive manner to many of the concerns that were raised about the need for training to address racial bias, excessive force, and de-escalation, and the requirement for increased transparency and accountability. These issues are now very much at the center of the public debate over what modern policinghowever large or small its scopemust be in this country. Critically, the Johns Hopkins Police Department (JHPD) legislation explicitly enacted the best practices recommended by the national Task Force on 21st Century Policing and the Consent Decree that currently governs the Baltimore Police Department.

Throughout the process and again in recent weeks, we have been keenly aware of the range of principled and thoughtful perspectives on these issues, and we hear now the increasingly urgent calls for reconsideration of the way in which public safety in our community is achieved.

Many people see no role whatsoever for sworn policing in our country. Many others accept the necessity of some role for sworn policing but seek a fundamental and vigorous reimagination of how that role can be discharged equitably and integrated with other initiatives that ensure community safety.

We want Johns Hopkins to be part of the conversation about what is possible for our city and country in rethinking the appropriate boundaries and responsibilities of policing, and to draw on the energies, expertise, and efforts of our community in advancing the agenda for consequential and enduring reform. And we want to be able to work nowwith a sense of shared purpose and commitment, with our neighbors, and across our university communityto develop and model these alternative approaches.

Given the need for us to come together as a community in this enterprise of reimagining public safety, we have decided to pause for at least the next two years the implementation of the JHPD.

Taking the immediate implementation of the JHPD off the table is important for several reasons:

We hold with utmost seriousness our responsibility for the safety of our entire community, and in that spirit embrace the opportunity before us to allow that communityat Johns Hopkins, in our city, and well beyondto lend its intellectual and moral leadership in pointing a way forward on an issue that has so deeply riven this country.

In partnership and gratitude,

Ronald J. Daniels President

Paul B. Rothman, M.D.Dean of the Medical FacultyCEO, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Kevin W. Sowers, M.S.N., R.N., F.A.A.N.President, Johns Hopkins Health SystemEVP, Johns Hopkins Medicine

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Johns Hopkins will pause development of a police department for at least two years - The Hub at Johns Hopkins