The GW
HATCHET
October 7, 2024 Vol. 121 Iss. 9
AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER • SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904 • ONLINE AT GWHATCHET.COM
GW internally investigating reports of unregistered firearms, inadequate training, officials say ARJUN SRINIVAS REPORTER
HANNAH MARR NEWS EDITOR
Officials said they are opening an internal investigation into reports that armed GW Police Department officers carried firearms not registered in D.C. and received inadequate training after faculty senators pressed them for more information on the claims during a meeting Friday. Upon repeated questions from four faculty senators about the reports, University President Ellen Granberg and Vice President for Safety and Operations Baxter Goodly said they could not comment on human resources or personnel issues for confidentiality reasons. Granberg said the reports are currently under investigation by the Office of the General Counsel and the Office of Human Resource Management & Development, adding that “when the time comes,” officials will examine what information they can share. Goodly said all GWPD guns are currently registered in D.C., which he had previously stated last week. “I have to register a major concern here, because while I understand your point about what is the current situation, it sounds to me like there was a period of time on this campus when people were carrying around guns that were unregistered,” said Philip Wirtz, a faculty senator and a professor of decision sciences and psychological and brain sciences. “So whether or not we are currently in compliance is really not speaking to the issue that I’m concerned about.” Wirtz asked if officials could confirm whether or not there was a period of time where GWPD Police Chief James Tate and former Captain of Operations Gabe Mullinax carried unregistered guns. Tate and Mullinax carried unregistered firearms on campus be-
Aston is ‘precedent’ in combating homelessness: advocates ELLA MITCHELL
CONTRIBUTING NEWS EDITOR
FIONA BORK
SENIOR STAFF WRITER
faculty senator and professor of biology. The 25-page resolution calls for a “thorough and independent investigation” into the quality and nature of members of the GWPD, which will be shared with the senate and the Board of Trustees. The resolution also requests that if allegations of illegality and safety violations are found to be true in an investigation, the individuals who are responsible and the offices that oversee them be “held accountable.” Faculty senators will vote on the resolution at their next meeting on Nov. 8. The senate passed a resolution in October 2023 calling on officials to pause the second phase of arming until officials released the full community feedback on the decision to arm officers, along with any changes to liability insurance and GWPD operational costs.
Wesley Thomas said he opted to sleep on the streets of Foggy Bottom and West End for 29 years because he didn’t want to enter the District’s congregate shelter system, where he’d be required to share a room with strangers. Thomas, who moved off the streets in 2017 and now helps people experiencing homelessness access temporary and permanent housing, said he avoided shelters because he was uncomfortable staying and storing his belongings in a room that lacked privacy. The Aston — a former GW residence hall on New Hampshire Avenue — is slated to open this year as the District’s first of its kind noncongregate shelter, which Thomas said will offer residents seclusion and security that he couldn’t access in shelters when he was experiencing homelessness. District officials purchased The Aston from GW in August 2023 with the intent of converting the space into a shelter that offers private living spaces to medically vulnerable people, mixed-gender couples, families with adult children and people waiting to move into permanent housing. D.C. kept the former residence hall’s roughly 100 single “studio-style” rooms and replaced its flooring, upgraded security and IT infrastructure, added administrative spaces and repaired the underground garage.
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ARWEN CLEMANS | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Vice President for Safety and Operations Baxter Goodly during Friday’s Faculty Senate meeting.
tween Aug. 30 and Sept. 27, 2023, according to an HR report filed last September obtained by The Hatchet and statements from three former supervisors. “I don’t know what the investigation will show, and so I can’t promise specifically,” Granberg said. “What I can say is, what we can share, we will.” Jennifer Brinkerhoff, a faculty senator and professor of international affairs, said she was “distressed” about the reports and was especially concerned about the alleged lack of training considering ongoing student protests that attract demonstrators from outside of the GW community. “I’m very sympathetic to how difficult it is to manage these situations,” Brinkerhoff said. “Nevertheless, the concern is that we have armed GWPD with insufficient training in the midst of crowds with outsiders present, especially
outsiders who have threatened violence, we have a serious problem.” In response, Granberg said she agrees the report was a “very disturbing article” that requires the University’s attention, adding that every officer who is currently armed is “fully trained” by a “reputable” outside group. Granberg did not specify which company leads the training, but former officers said they reached out to D.C. Security Associates — a group that assists District residents in navigating owning a firearm — about issues relating to gun safety. Patricia Hernandez, a faculty senator and professor of cellular and molecular biology, said she is sponsoring a resolution on safety and accountability on campus, specifically regarding campus gun safety and during the meeting handed out the first page of the resolution with Guillermo Orti, a
Jewish students navigate identity, antisemitism after Oct. 7
Pro-Palestinian students center Gaza in campus activism after Oct. 7
JENNIFER IGBONOBA
BROOKE FORGETTE
NEWS EDITOR
CONTRIBUTING NEWS EDITOR
One year after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, some Jewish community members said they have grown in their religious identities and connection to Israel as they navigate heightened antisemitism, advocacy for loved ones affected by the war in Gaza and personal grief. Some students said they are increasingly aware of antisemitism and its manifestations in protests, social media and in their everyday lives after Hamas on Oct. 7 killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 hostages, 97 of which are still missing. Amid rising antisemitism in the past year throughout the United States, Jewish students and leaders said some parts of GW’s Jewish community have grown closer in the last year through civic action like fundraising for Israeli emergency health services, emotional support for peers experiencing trauma and conversations about the events of the past year. “I’m able to live out my daily life, I’m able to have fun and to be a normal college student — whatever you define normal as — live a typical college life,” junior Aidan Cullers, co-president of the Jewish Students Association, said. “But at the same time, there is always that feeling deep down that the world has changed and that the world that I grew up in prior to October 7 is not the world that is after October 7.” Immediately following the Oct. 7 attacks, the Israeli government declared war with Hamas. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli military’s counteroffensive since the war in Gaza began. Cullers, who is also a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity, said the organization coordinated a fundraising drive a week
Pro-Palestinian student advocates said they’ve rallied together to uplift Palestinian voices and experiences on campus despite resistance from the University, one year after the onset of the war in Gaza. After Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, shortly followed by Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip, GW became a focal point for pro-Palestinian student activism, with vigils, sitins, marches and a nearly two-week encampment in University Yard in solidarity with Gaza, amassing fervent student support amid alleged sanctions and suspensions from officials. Pro-Palestinian student activists said Oct. 7 represents a somber marker of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military within the past year and stands as a moment that brought visibility to the Palestinian cause on campus and internationally. Manny Blanco, an organizer with the GWU Student Coalition for Palestine, said visibility of Palestinian suffering has reached a “critical mass,” sparking an internationally recognized understanding of the war in Gaza since it first broke out. As the war hits its oneyear mark, more than 41,000 Palestinians — the majority women and children — have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 hostages. The humanitarian crises in Gaza continues to worsen as famine spreads throughout the region, according to United Nations experts. Blanco said officials used to “take advantage” of the fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict was “in the margins” and less recognized before the war by taking disciplinary action against pro-Palestinian speech on campus.
DANIEL HEUER | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR A student wearing a yamaka attends a vigil for six Israeli hostages.
after the attacks and raised more than $7,500 for Magen David Adom, the national aid society of Israel. “There were still bombs being dropped in Israel at this time, so we did what we felt like we could do,” Cullers said. “That’s something that kept me going, and I know it’s something that kept a lot of my brothers going as well.” Cullers said after Oct. 7, he became aware of community members’ “precarious standing,” noticing that antisemitism appeared more prominent on campus, across the United States and on social media than community members had previously thought. Just under a third of hate crimes in the past year were motivated by anti-Jewish bias, the largest percentage of any bias that year, compared to 13 percent the year prior, according to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. Cullers said he grew up in circles where there was positive conversation about being Jewish, adding that he previously believed antisemitism was a “dying form of hate.” He said the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2018 shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue and now, the aftermath of Oct. 7, have all been events that brought a wave of antisemitism to the United States. “Even if it is one person
hundreds of miles away who holds those views, that still, unfortunately, can ruin someone’s day,” Cullers said. Cullers said his life “certainly” changed as a leader after Oct. 7 when he leaned into fundraising for Israel. “I used to be kind of skeptical of wanting this mass donation campaign,” Cullers said. “‘Does it really work? Is it really that effective?’ But now, after the work that we did after October 7, I can firmly say yes, it’s important, and it really has an impact, and it means something.” Rabbi Yudi Steiner, the director of the Rohr Chabad Center at GW, said Chabad started hosting free, nightly family-style community dinners after Oct. 7. Steiner said there is “nuance” among the Jewish community regarding the war in Gaza, but a “majority” of the community felt pro-Palestinian protests at GW and around the country that ensued after Oct. 7 were not in solidarity with the plight of Palestinians or government policy in Israel. “It was protest against the right for Jewish people to be proud, to be connected, to support a homeland, and when every other nationality and ethnicity and country can be proud of who they are, but Jewish people can’t, many people felt that that was antisemitism,” he said.
ARWEN CLEMANS | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Students at a vigil for Palestinian and Lebanese people killed by Israel.
“The school’s response is now something that a lot of eyes are on and is on a public platform, and so everyone’s attention is there,” Blanco said. He said the vigil that Students for Justice in Palestine organized days after Oct. 7, which University President Ellen Granberg condemned as a “celebration of terrorism,” helped convey to students the tragedy of strikes on Palestinians. He said vigils are not “explicitly” protests but are spaces for communities to mourn publicly together, which he said only nonminority communities have the “luxury” to do. Candles lit the center of Kogan Plaza last year as roughly 120 students joined together during the vigil to mourn Palestinians killed during Israel’s bombing of Gaza, reading the names of people killed in the strikes, playing music and delivering speeches. An SJP organizer said at the event that the Oct. 7 attacks marked a new era in Palestine’s struggle for liberation, with “resistance fighters” dispelling the “illusion of invincibility.” “This specific form of putting the issue in front of everyone, a mainstream way, has a lot of power in heightening the contradictions in terms of how we view race in the United States and the way that we construe narratives of cer-
tain people in certain countries and things like that,” Blanco said. Reports of Islamophobia increased from 16 in September 2023 to 64 in October 2023, a 300 percent increase, according to the FBI Crime Data Explorer. Weeks after Oct. 7, four members of SJP projected anti-Israel and anti-GW messages, like “End the siege on Gaza” and “GW the blood of Palestine is on your hands” onto Gelman Library. Granberg said the projections violated University policy in her statement following the demonstration. The University later suspended the group, preventing them from hosting and participating in on-campus activities for at least 90 days. Blanco said the level of solidarity among Palestinian students and pro-Palestinian activists on campus is “huge.” Blanco said as the student coalition continues to call on officials to divest from companies that provide weapons to Israel, he understands it would be “very hard” for the University to divest in terms of its willingness to financially pull out from companies and harness support from stakeholders. But he said officials’ lack of consideration for their demands is “appalling,” referencing GW’s refusal to divest from companies partnering with Israel.