Last spring a lecture by Daniel Pipes was scheduled in Kane Hall. It was just one of hundreds of public lectures the University hosts each year, but it was a controversial event. Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum and a columnist for both the New York Post and the Jerusalem Post, holds what some would call passionately pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian views. So it was no surprise that protesters showed up at the lecture or that police on duty found it necessary to clear the lobby.
The event would probably have been forgotten by now, had it not been for the complaints of one lecture attendee who claimed the police had singled him out for abuse because of his Middle Eastern descent. The police were eventually cleared of wrongdoing after an investigation, but the whole affair threw the spotlight on a process the University has painstakingly set up in hopes of avoiding just such an incident.
“Obviously, the University doesn’t shy away from controversy. That’s part of who we are and what we do,” says Norm Arkans, associate vice president and executive director of University Relations. “But when we do have events at which there may be controversy, we want to make sure we provide a safe environment for the speaker to be able to speak and for the audiences to be able to one, attend the lecture, and two, if they do wish to protest, have a safe and secure way in which they can voice their protest.”
Arkans chairs the Use of University Facilities (UUF) Committee, the group charged with overseeing the planning of public events on campus. Any event sponsored by a campus unit or organization that is open to the general public must be reviewed and approved by the committee. Most of the time, that approval is given almost automatically, Arkans says, but when events are controversial, it’s a different matter.
“Part of our responsibility,” he explains, “is to make sure the event sponsors are talking to campus police, to parking, that they have considered how they’re going to handle crowd control, whether they’re going to have overflow rooms, whether they’re going to be conducting visual inspections of bags, how they’re going to do that, what staffing level they need, and so on.”
In other words, the UUF committee tries to warn the sponsors about what might happen and what they need to think about to ensure that the event goes smoothly. Probably among the first people those groups will contact are Sgt. Kaye Shea, who is the UW Police Department’s officer in charge of special events and/or her supervisor, Lt. Ray Wittmier. One or both of them will meet with event organizers and others to figure out what needs to be done.
Any number of people might be present at that meeting, Shea says. If it’s a student event, representatives of the Student Activities Office will be there along with the organizers. A representative from the building in which the event is to be held will often come too. “We try to organize everyone who might have one piece of the scenario,” Shea says.
At the meeting, organizers will be asked what kind of history the speaker has with regard to protests and whether there have been any threats made against him or her. “If we know ahead of time that that’s the case, we immediately heighten our security measures,” Shea says. “A lot of times the speaker will request additional security. We make arrangements then for the speaker to arrive safely on campus by bringing them into a secure location where we arrange to have officers meet them and escort them into the facility.”
In those cases, the police say, they also have to have what they call a rescue and evacuation plan; in other words, a way to get the speaker out of the building and away from campus quickly, should things get ugly.
After that initial planning meeting, those involved stay in touch and may decide to meet again as new information develops. Such things as advance publicity and activities by protest groups can make a difference in the atmosphere, Shea and Wittmier say. In the case of the Pipes lecture, for example, e-mails were flying between protesters and organizers long before Pipes arrived, and a local radio station whipped up interest in the larger community by discussing the coming lecture on the air.
Police who work at controversial events have one goal, Shea and Wittmier say — to keep the peace. They ask organizers to make an announcement before the event saying, “If you are disruptive you will be warned once. If you repeat the behavior you’re subject to ejection.” The first contact with a disruptive audience member is usually made by the organizers. Only if the person continues to be disruptive do the police intervene.
“In most cases, a third warning by the police will handle it or they’ll leave voluntarily,” Shea says. “If not, they’re removed. In most cases they’re just told, ‘You’re out of here’ and they’re escorted out. If there is some resistance, then they are escorted through an elbow hold or wrist hold.”
At the Pipes lecture, the problem was not in the auditorium but in the lobby, where two opposing groups began arguing with each other. Police eventually asked everyone to leave, and they say all but one person — the person who complained about his treatment — complied.
It’s a prime example of how things can still go wrong no matter how much you plan. Shea says planners met four times to talk about the Pipes lecture, but they focused on what might happen in the lecture hall. The problem turned out to be in the lobby.
“As we’re thinking about it, we might ask ourselves how we could have avoided having a crowd out in the lobby to begin with,” Arkans says. “That would have entailed an overflow room.”
But Wittmier says that police are “almost in a no-win situation” in connection with controversial events. “There are people who are going to want to be there to create a disturbance,” he says. “They’ll do that and there’ll be an interaction (with police or with counter-protesters). Some people’s determination of success is that there’s no interaction, but sometimes it’s totally unavoidable.”
But despite the problems the University faces, Arkans, who has served on the UUF committee for 17 years and chaired it for 12, has never known the committee to deny a speaker’s appearance because of fear of controversy. It came close a couple of years ago when a group of anti-abortion crusaders came to campus with a display of enlarged photographs and other materials designed to provoke a reaction. But, with heavy police involvement, the display went on.
“It made a lot of people angry, but I think it was also one of our finer moments,” Arkans says. “It showed we were able to accept views that we knew would offend a lot of people in both directions. We were saying ‘We can deal with these sorts of things because of the kind of place we are.’ ”