A Johns Hopkins faculty committee held a public virtual hearing on Monday night where they called for the Baltimore City Council to hold a hearing on the private JHU police force. Dozens of community members logged on.
The university plans for officers to begin training in the late summer and fall, afterwards they’ll begin patrolling in a “limited capacity.”
In 2019, the Maryland General Assembly passed a bill that would allow the university to form its own police department. The controversial measure has been met with protests at every turn, including a month-long sit-in that took over the university’s Garland Hall.
The law allows Hopkins police to patrol JHU areas that are “owned, leased, or operated by, or under the control of Johns Hopkins University.” A memorandum of understanding with the Baltimore Police Department defines that as the university’s main Homewood campus, the East Baltimore campus, and Peabody campus in Mount Vernon. Also under jurisdiction of the private JHU force is “the public property that is immediately adjacent to the campus, including: (i) a sidewalk, a street, or any other thoroughfare; and (ii) a parking facility.”
But those boundaries, which were released in 2022, are unclear according to the Police Committee of the Johns Hopkins Krieger School Faculty Senate, which is dedicated to analyzing the force.
Joan Floyd, a Johns Hopkins graduate who works on the committee, walked the virtual audience through an enlarged map of the proposed JHU police jurisdiction. Floyd, also a Homewood resident, pointed to areas that appear to be in neither JHU or BPD boundaries or elsewise in both.
“How would we know when we’re in the primary jurisdiction area of Hopkins police? How would the officers know?” she queried. “How would the 911 dispatchers know how to dispatch who where?”
Use of force has been the long reigning concern among opposition, one that the committee reiterated on Monday.
“The worst case scenario that I have in my head is of a member of the Hopkins police force using violence to adjudicate an issue with somebody, either in this community or in the surrounding ones. That's my worst case scenario,” said Committee Chair Lester Spence, a professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins.
“One of the things we really want to drive home is the need for more oversight and public investigation.”
"The University is fully confident in the statutory process established by the General Assembly for the development and operation of the Johns Hopkins Police Department. Just as the development of our MOU with BPD was transparent and relied extensively on community engagement and input, our final policies that govern the JHPD will reflect community feedback," wrote a spokesperson for the university in an email to WYPR.
City Council President Nick Mosby’s office did not immediately return requests for comment.
The Baltimore City Council could approve a resolution to allow JHU police to patrol the university’s surrounding neighborhoods, according to a memorandum of understanding with the university and Baltimore City Police Department.
