Are You Ready for Your Next Protest? A Dozen Considerations for Campus Administrators

Last spring’s seemingly ubiquitous pro-Gaza protests, demonstrations, and counter demonstrations that challenged campus safety and security are not unique and should not have come as a surprise. We have seen protests at political rallies and conventions, against campus speakers with unpopular views. Inasmuch as protests have been a regular part of our political landscape, it is prudent for campus administrators to address the likelihood of campus protests, not as “if” but rather as “when.”

There are many urgent daily issues facing campus administrators, including salaries, class scheduling, and building construction. In a way, the prospects of campus protests are not a daily concern. Instead, they are only potential episodic threats. Understandably, administrators tend to focus more on the immediate issues at hand.

Related Article: Responding to Civil Unrest: Creating Policies for Maintaining Security and University Support

The problem with this near-term focus is that failure to plan for future protests may be disastrous. Once a protest on or near campus becomes imminent, it is too late to play catch-up. There will be too many moving parts to ensure a unified, proactive and effective response.

Specifically, there will be insufficient time to coordinate plans with campus actors; reduced ability to set parameters to guide protestors and campus personnel; inadequate time to identify shortfalls in campus resources and capabilities; and inadequate time to establish command relationships and memoranda of agreements (MOAs) with local responders such as police and emergency medical personnel. Such MOAs are essential to define the extent and nature of their response, resources they will provide (e.g., drones, traffic control, personal protective equipment), and means of providing information and coordinating decisions with campus officials. The failure to address these issues threatens campus safety and security; is likely to undermine the institution’s brand; create or exacerbate campus political, economic, social and cultural divisions; and result in injuries, property damage, and exorbitant costs.

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Effective Campus Planning to Address Potential Protests

Effective campus planning for protests is best addressed in three distinct phases: planning, response and mitigation, and post-event recovery.

Planning

1. Prioritize Goals. Actions taken in any enterprise must be goal-driven. Unless actions are developed to attain certain goals and assessed against them, they tend to be myopic and reactive. Yet, when leaders are asked to identify their goals in some undertaking, their goals are often so general that they are unable to support granular planning needed to respond to complex and dynamic situations. Most leaders, if asked to identify their goals regarding protests, would likely name avoiding violence to ensure campus safety, the continuity of campus operations, and the protection of property. However, there are at least seven other goals including:

• Public image/campus reputation
• The protection of the rights of protestors and other campus community members
• Minimize associated costs for dealing with protests (e.g., overtime for police and other campus personnel, facility and grounds repairs, clean-up, replacement of resources)
• Avoid liability
• Morale on campus
• Subsequent recruitment and retention of students, faculty and staff
• Discourage future protests

As if achieving the aforementioned goals is not a daunting problem, there are additional complicating factors.

First, the various stakeholders on campus may assign different priorities to these goals. For instance, campus police or security will be more concerned with safety and security than they are with campus morale and recruitment/retention of campus community members. Specifically, campus police will achieve their goals by assembling intelligence on prospective protestors, surveilling people on campus, controlling people’s movements, and ensuring a visible presence at the protests. These actions may conflict with other stakeholders’ goals such as avoiding the image of martial responses and maintaining morale on campus. Similarly, campus financial officers will filter projected initiatives through the lenses of financial costs, and legal officials will assess actions against potential liability considerations.

2. Coordinate responses. The second complicating factor is the need to coordinate these varied perspectives and priorities. The institution cannot allow individual stakeholders to plan using only their respective needs. Failure to coordinate campus-wide responses and activities will result in disconnected and even conflicting and counter-productive results. While different stakeholders have different goals, these goals are not necessarily in play at the same time.

For instance, intelligence compiled by police precedes limitations to movement on campus and surveillance. Budgeters’ cost estimations precede the lawyers’ liability calculations. Given these differences, action priorities associated with these goals and the order in which they are accomplished must be determined. Only then can they be incorporated into plans. It is the responsibility of the institution head to call all stakeholders together, define their respective responsibilities, and consolidate overarching and prioritized institution goals that may supersede the individual goals of the stakeholders.

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3. Identify behavioral restrictions. Before the respective responsibilities of the institution’s personnel can be determined, school administrators must understand their own rights and responsibilities as well as those of the protestors.

The institution has rights and may impose reasonable restrictions on protestors seeking a permit to demonstrate. Failure by the protestors to conform to these requirements can result in the denial of a permit or, if the protestors are already on campus, being required by the school to leave and facing criminal charges, such as trespass, if they refuse.

Reasonable restrictions on protestors and demonstrations include:

• Protestors may not interrupt institution operations by occupying buildings, denying access to buildings, or interrupting academic activities such as lectures
• Protestors may be limited to a specific yet accessible area
• Protestors may be prohibited from wearing masks to hide their identities
• Protestors may be prohibited from carrying backpacks and other parcels that could conceal weapons or contraband, etc.
• Protestors cannot pitch tests or make fires
• May not use fighting words, intimidation, etc.

At the same time, protestors have the following rights and the school is obligated to protect these rights:

• Right to assemble on public property
• No permit needed to march on public sidewalks
• Cannot be limited in their ability to communicate their views (i.e., can’t limit time to 1 a.m. – 3 a.m. or limit protestors’ activity to inaccessible locations)
• Right to make unpopular, even outrageous statements
• May photograph and record activities (including those of police, as long as they don’t interfere with public safety)
• Counter-protestors have the right to be within sight and sound of protestors
• If directed to disperse, protestors must be given reasonable time and means to do so

4. Ensure rights and requirements of campus community members are promulgated and clear. College community members need to understand the respective rights and obligations of the school and protestors to protect the school from disruption, violence, and liability. This information should be placed in student and faculty/staff handbooks, presented at convocations, periodically reviewed in campus publications, and explained on the school webpage and campus social media pages.

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An enumeration of rights and responsibilities, however, is not enough. Terms such as “not disrupting campus operations,” what constitutes trespass, and the identification of potential consequences for violating school regulations (e.g., suspension, expulsion, termination) must be defined. Failure to specify the bounds of acceptable behavior will result in uncontrolled and unpredictable behavior later and possibly subject the school to liability suits due to its vague and ambiguous policies.

5. Conduct tabletop and command post exercises (TTXs and CPXs). So far, numerous goals and behavioral rights and limitations have been identified, along with the need to coordinate them at the institutional level. Coordination must also extend to external public actors, such as local police, emergency medical personnel, and transportation officials, and private providers such as towing companies, port-a-john providers, lighting providers, etc. Each of these actors will provide response capabilities needed by the campus.

The coordination of campus internal actors among themselves and with local responders may be accomplished by command post and tabletop exercises. The former exercises the exchange of information within and between campus and external command officials; the latter exercises the identification and coordination of resources and their application to the scenario by internal stakeholders and external responders.

A portion of areas exercised in TTXs and CPXs include:

• The identification of required resources (i.e., do assets exist in sufficient quantity, are they accessible, and can they be sustained?)
• Timelines for the application of required assets (i.e., staffing, equipment, communications)
• Coordination between internal and external responders
• Command relationships and authorities
• Testing communications and radio protocols and the distribution of information
• Response timelines
• Asset delivery/application timelines
• Access routes and traffic control (e.g., can ambulances access injured individuals through crowds of protestors and demonstration attendees?)
• Responses to potential contingencies (e.g., an unanticipated protest breaks out nearby, inclement weather)
• Dealing with the media

The results of these exercises will assist planning to prepare campus and local officials to respond to a scheduled protest in a unified manner that maximizes effectiveness.

Response to an Imminent Protest

If the previously-mentioned steps have been taken, a school should be in a good position to manage the event. If a campus hasn’t taken these steps or if a spontaneous protest pops up, a school can only do what they can with the time and resources available. In any event, the planning accomplished in steps 1-5 will allow the best possible response to an unanticipated protest.

When a protest is imminent, the following four steps should be taken:

1. Immediate meetings must occur, first between campus administrators, campus police/security, and all campus stakeholders; second, between selected school officials and protest leaders; and third, between campus and external local officials and responders (with protest leaders invited).

• Before the first meeting occurs, police must gather intelligence about the protest leaders and the size and tactics of past protests. State fusion centers, a review of the protestors’ statements and demands in the media, and calls to local police in locations of past protests can provide this intelligence. This information will help establish school plans and priorities. This first meeting is the time when the plans, resources and capabilities of school stakeholders are reviewed and coordinated in light of the probable threat.
• School officials must then meet with protest leaders, if possible. The tenor of this meeting should not be zero-sum or adversarial. In this meeting, school officials should affirm their support for the protestors’ rights, determine what the protestors want (e.g., where demonstrators may assemble and their right to distribute leaflets), identify reasonable school rights that limit protest activities, and identify the consequences of non-compliance. An understanding between the school and the protestors and the willingness to compromise to maximize achievement of both sides’ goals is crucial. (Note: If school officials cannot meet with protest leaders ahead of time, they may have to meet after the protest has started. In this situation, the goal of school officials should be to meet with protest leaders away from the mass of protestors. Isolating protest leaders from their followers will maximize their flexibility since they won’t have to maintain face.)
• A meeting with school officials should then be conducted with local responders to provide intelligence and information about the protestors, school plans and capabilities, expectations, the desired contributions of local responders, and command relationships.

2. Announce the approved protest location. Upon the conclusion of these meetings, school officials should announce where the protestors can assemble, their access routes, protest times, mutual commitment to rules accepted by both school officials and protestors, and the consequences of non-compliance. This establishment of expectations will provide structure to the school’s response to the protestors and support school actions taken in the event of non-compliance.

3. Operate from a command post. School officials should set up a command post where school stakeholders and external officials may assemble. Command post attendees should include the following principals or their designees: the college president, financial VP, police/security, dispatch, IT, grounds, facilities, food services, parking, community outreach, legal, student body president, and representatives of local police, emergency medical responders, public works, and roads. This command post will ensure the collocation of decisionmakers, the coordination of their decisions, the ability of decisionmakers to communicate directly with personnel in their respective chains of command, and a mechanism for and location to which intelligence can be transmitted to inform command post decisions. Additionally, the command post can coordinate communiques to the public and the media.

Related Article: Dealing with Protestors: Minimizing Conflict While Protecting School Interests

4. Decide who will speak with protestors. It is best for a single person, authorized to speak for the school and informed in real-time by command post decisions, to speak with the protest leader. This person should not be a law enforcement member. Bringing a badge and a gun to sensitive negotiations will poison the interaction because police bring the implicit threat of force to the meeting. It is not a good image for police to be viewed as the school’s negotiators. Furthermore, it is inappropriate for police to negotiate (i.e., compromise) with the protestors. In the event of continued non-compliance, it will be the role of the police to issue a final command for compliance, whether it is to take down tents, abandon a particular location, extinguish fires, or stop destroying school property. If non-compliance persists, police (both campus and local) will then impose the legal consequences (with the minimum level of force needed) such as arresting protestors for trespass and releasing them on a summons or transporting them to a detention facility.

After the Protest

Important tasks will remain once the protest is over.

Site clean-up, etc.

Upon the end of the protest, various tasks will need to be conducted. These tasks will involve many campus actors, such as groundskeepers to pick up litter and remove barricades; facilities to remove graffiti from buildings and repair damages to buildings and signage; campus police to return equipment provided by external actors; and all actors to inventory equipment expended and secure replacements.

Capture lessons learned.

After a protest, it will most likely be obvious that a campus’ previous plans for dealing with protestors had some flaws, including but not limited to:

• Expectations will not be met
• Equipment consumption rates may be less than or exceed expectations
• Communications equipment may fail to deliver crisp audio in certain locations
• Response times may be different than expected
• Campus dispatch may be overwhelmed
• The handling and transportation of arrestees may be problematic
• Logistical gremlins may be encountered
• Training of various campus entities may be inadequate.

These lessons learned in the preparatory, response, mitigation and recovery phases must be identified and consolidated. Corrective actions to address them must then be assigned to offices of primary responsibility, funded, coordinated, prioritized, and implemented. Further, these lessons must be used to modify existing MOAs, campus plans, and school policies and guidance included in handbooks and on the college website.

Outreach to the public.

After the protest, significant work will need to be done by the public information officer assuring the public that the campus is safe and academic operations are ongoing, addressing problems that occurred, and answering questions from the media. These communications will be accomplished through public statements, emails, website postings, interviews, and social media platforms. These pronouncements will need to be coordinated with the college’s legal officials to ensure they are supportive of the college’s interests in ongoing or future liability proceedings.

Effective Management of Campus Protests Is Complex

This short essay can only give superficial coverage to the many complex political, social, economic, cultural and logistical considerations associated with dealing with protestors. In addition to the specific considerations noted above, let us review some general summary operating principles:

• Plans must be developed and coordinated on campus and with community partners before a protest materializes. These plans must address each of the four phases of a crisis: prevention/preparation, response, mitigation, and recovery.
• Different stakeholders will have different goals in each of the crisis phases and these goals may not always be consistent with those of others. Also, these goals are related to each other in causal relationships so they must be prioritized and coordinated.
• First responders cannot do it all. Throughout all four crisis phases, all campus stakeholders (e.g., police, groundskeepers, facilities, IT, legal, PIO, food services, parking, counselors, faculty members, communications, etc.) as well as selected external actors will play key roles in the school’s response and subsequent corrective actions.
• Prudent administrators will coordinate these roles in TTXs and CPXs.
• A school’s response capabilities must be assessed long before the protest so corrective actions may be taken. This assessment, which will be reviewed in a future article, must identify the school’s goals and the ability of its available resources to achieve them.

Although protests are an unalienable and treasured part of our political culture and essential to the discussion of diverse views on campus, the prospect of a campus protest or demonstration is unsettling. It portends possible injuries, loss of reputation, loss of faculty and students, destruction of campus facilities, excessive costs, and lawsuits to mention a few of the potential downsides.

These potential issues cannot be wholly controlled or eliminated, but they can be minimized by a systematic approach that coordinates goals, plans and capabilities. The time to begin these preparations in now. Any expectation or hope that protests can be addressed “on the fly” will result in failure and myriad negative consequences that have been visited upon the unprepared.

John M. Weinstein PhD is a retired lieutenant for Northern Virginia Community College and now is a consultant with Dusseau Solutions.

Note: The views expressed by guest bloggers and contributors are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Campus Safety.