Slumbergate

In 2006, Brown’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) was accused of racism after Chipalo Street ’06 MA’07, an African-American masters student, received an abrasion above his eye after being arrested. More recently, DPS has been accused of suppressing sexual assault data. Needless to say, after receiving its lumps DPS’s morale is at an all-time low. Before reading this, I want you to remember, first, that DPS has been the victim of many accusations without basis; and second, that a majority of Brown’s police force is actually here to protect and serve. And so, while I think the department’s disconsolate state is unfortunate, there is little excuse for the few individuals who are featured in the rest of this article.

In the midst of a financial crisis, Brown’s budget is pinched. Not even a private University is safe from the undulating uncertainty of the markets. And yet, DPS has put in a request for more money in order to hire more officers so as to alleviate the pressures of understaffed shifts. It was a request that was months in the making. Chief Mark Porter told his officers before the end of last school year that they were going to begin doing regular checks of buildings all around campus. If you listen to the police scanners, they are perpetually abuzz with officers calling in locations from all over.

“Charlesfield and Brown,” I heard over the scanners, just days after high-school students had left Brown’s campus following their summer classes. There I stood, at Charlesfield and Brown at 4:04am, and there was no officer. The car that called was parked in a parking lot right next to Keeney Quadrangle, and there were no officers to be found. This seemed to be a consistent trend. While Brown’s police logs are chock-full of calls from different locations, if you are at one of those locations when they are radioed between the hours of 2am and 6am, chances are that you will be all alone. But calling in false locations was only one of a number of miscreancies which I observed throughout the time that the Summer@Brown program was underway.

All of this was occurring under the watchful eye of Lieutenant Henry Lombardi, who was the inspiration for this story. Last semester, Lombardi tendered his resignation and headed toward retirement. Lieutenant Lombardi was the third-shift supervisor with DPS for several years. He’d been here long enough to see the department go through the good and the bad (although, there has been an awful lot of bad during the last few years).

One night, while biking home on John Street, I watched the taillights of a car pull through the Hoppin House archway (Hoppin House is on the corner of John St. and Benefit St.). I thought nothing of it. Then again, by mere coincidence, the same thing happened the next night. It piqued my curiosity. I parked my bike, waited a few minutes, and walked through the carriage arch that led toward the back of the building, where there was parked a running car. I crept warily toward the vehicle and pressed my face against the window. Inside was an officer (whom I later identified as Henry Lombardi) dressed in full uniform. He was slouched over, fast asleep, a mere five minutes after he’d parked.

After asking questions of numerous officers in the department, I discovered that Mr. Lombardi’s habit of sleeping on the job was well known. “You don’t bother him about it, he won’t bother you,” two different officers told me on separate occasions. One officer even claimed to have brought the problem to Captain Paul Shanley a long time ago. The officer said that after being caught, Lombardi told the chief that he had been having some sleep issues, took time off, and came back, supposedly cured of whatever ailed him. But apparently that was not actually the case. In fact, it seems that Lombardi has been sleeping on the job ever since the day he got to Brown. And he’s not the only one.

Just down the road from the Main Green, behind 25 George Street, is a parking lot that is nearly impossible to see from the road. Like clockwork, between 2am and 5am, one of Brown’s police vehicles sit idling. It is Officer John Heston’s favorite hideaway – where he is of no use to anyone. In mid-October, I approached Heston. As he was parked behind 25 George Street, I knocked on his window and asked him what he was doing. “It’s my break; I get a break,” he told me. But it’s curious. Heston sits in his car on a regular basis for nearly three hours while his break is only supposed to be thirty minutes long. What is even more curious, however, was the department’s response to my discovery of resting Heston. Rather than addressing the issue, the DPS’s Lieutenant Jackson had Heston sit at a computer, looking at pictures of students in order to identify who had approached him (yours truly).

Needless to say, DPS has a lot of problems. They are an unregulated mess. Brown seems to have made more of an effort to ensure that safeRIDE is running efficiently, even outfitting them with GPS units, than it has to ensure that the campus is well policed. As a result, free from scrutiny, officers like Lombardi and Heston can sleep their shifts away while students are robbed (sometimes at gunpoint) or beaten up by local riffraff, and no one is the wiser.