Fox Paul Mauro Interview On The Brown Shooting

I've been puzzled that so little attention has been paid to the Brown shooting in any media, mainstream or alt. This is partly because the holidays started on Columbus Day. Oddly, the only analysis or opinion that's run at all at Real Clear Politics was its link to a Conservative Treehouse piece that suggested Brown may have disabled its surveillance cameras at the behest of left-wing groups, which I discussed here, but so far, we've had no corroboration that this was or wasn't done.

About the closest any media outlet has come to serious analysis of the issues surrounding the shooting is an interview over the weekend Fox did with its contributor Paul Mauro, who held policy-level positions with NYPD in a 23-year career. He touches on several key issues in the interview, embedded above. At 2:10, he begins:

Brown University police leadership really has to own a lot of this. They really seem to have had no provisions in place for hardening that target. That was an outer-perimeter building for that university. The fact that the person who was a quote-unquote "hero" here was living in the basement showed you how lax things were. But in light of what [Neves] just did, usually by now we have some kind of an image of how he lived, what he was up to, what his gripe was, there doesn't seem to have been a manifesto, he seems to have purposely tried to keep himself vague here, and that's a little odd, because the whole thing feels ideological, but he's not giving us a message, which is a little bit contradictory in these events. And then there's the fact that he clearly took measures to avoid the cameras, try to hide, all of that, then he keeps his rental car overdue, which would have caused an alert, and then he kills himself Tuesday, when the case didn't seem very close to being solved. So there's a lot of internal inconsistencies here, and it may just go to a disorganized mind that was slipping down and had a gripe agaist the world.

This repeats what I've been saying for the past several days, that Brown's vice president for "Public Safety and Emergency Management" was hired from the University of Utah, where he'd been on administrative leave for much of his tenure due to concerns that he was unqualified, as well as complaints from his staff. This is the last guy who's going to rock any boats and the one guy you'd expect to be completely feckless in managing any real emergency -- and this is how Brown wanted it.

He's also raising the issue of Neves Valente's motive -- what point was he trying to make? What was his gripe? There's been general speculation that he must have spent time in the lecture hall in the Barus & Holley building, and the shooting must have had some relation to this. An interview with one of Neves's few friends during his time at Brown suggests the problem:

Scott Watson said he was a former classmate and friend of Neves Valente during his time at Brown University 25 years ago.

. . . "He was bored because he knew more than any of us, he already should've had a PhD," Watson said. "He hated Brown and he hated Providence."

. . . "Basically, he thought the quality of education was too low," Watson said. "He moved from Portugal to go to a school with an education level that he thought was ridiculous, he didn’t like the people, and he didn’t like the food."

While I've tried to focus my grievances in a more constructive direction, I can certainly relate to his issues with the Ivies. The quality of undergraduate educaion there is low, largely because PhDs everywhere are a uniform product. There's little qualitative difference between a Harvard PhD and one from the University of Arkansas; they both meet the same course requirements and have very similar experiences in formation. So why go through the admissions rat race and pay so much more for an Ivy?

It appears that Neves pursued an Ivy degree with high expectations and discovered that Brown was, in the words of frustrated undergraduate Alex Shieh, a "fraud" and a "racket"; its Physics PhD program was no better than any low-ranked public institution. I'd be ticked, too, just not to the point of shooting up a lecture hall. It's a shame Neves couldn't put this in perspective. Paul Mauro continues,

. . . I think they would have gotten {Neves without the "hero's" help], but fortunately, you had this homeless person. Homeless people, when it comes to wherever they're living, can be very proprietary, even if it's a cardboard box on a sidewalk. So the fact that this guy came into this building and was wandering around for two weeks, came to the attention of this homeless guy, I'm not surprised actually, that he kinda followed him, says why is he coming into my domain, I'm the one who lives in the basement here, who's this new face? He was used to seeing students, people of a certain age, and here's this anomaly, I assume he tried to talk to him at some point, and obviously the perpetrator wanted no part of him, but yuou do have to say he was remarkably observant, followed him all the way to the car, and finally got to the police, it was unfortunate that he delayed as long as he did, but when he finally got to the police, he knew the fact that the car had Florida plates, might be a rental car, he knew the make and model, and that advanced things significantly, there's no denying that.

Like several other commentators, Mauro discounts "John's" contribution. He attributes the guy's motive to the proprietary instincts of any homeless person and complains that he waited too long to notify police. But there's a general consensus that homelessness seriously affects mental health, so that even if "John" was mostly concerned that Neves was encroaching on his territory, he displayed unusual insight and persistence in pursuing Neves and recording the details of his car. Once he got to see the state attorney general, the AG charadcterized him as "articulate" and "persuasive", potentially the best witness he ever had. This is not a garden-variety druggie.

But let's conduct a thought exprriment. Let's say that homeless guy "John" went straight to the police station at maybe 5:00 PM on that Saturday instead of waiting until Tuesday, when the police announced they wanted to talk to him. What do you suspect the reaction of the desk sergeant would have been to a homelss guy coming in to the station Saturday evening amd saying he'd seen the shooter that afternoon? Right. He'd have taken him straight to see the state attorney general, wouldn't he? "John" did the only possible thing and waited to hear the police would listen. The homeless guy had a good idea of how the world works. Mauro goes on,

You know, at the end of the day, I feel like the heads of security at the Brown University police were just acting in accordance with what Brown University executives, from the president on down, wanted. I'm going to use may own jargon here, these are defunders. It's very easy to be a holy man on a mountain, as the saying goes, it's very easy to sit in an Ivy League school and act like none of this matters and the police are the problem, but when you consider that we have high schools and grammar schools conducting active-shooter drills across this nation and some of the stuff we've seen, the idea that the Brown University police, it's a police department, they aren't security guards, they are gun carriers who are licensed to make arrests just like any police department, and the fact that they had no security measures in place at this building, seem to have had no protocols in place to respond to an active shooter in conjunction with Providence police, I mean the cascading litany of failures here really does argue that there need to be some major changes here, and if you're working in security at another higher education institution across this country, don't wait for it to happen to you, learn from this, because it really was, in my estimnation, a pattern of failure.

Here's something Mauro doesn't mention. The whole Brown shooter case is a vindication of surveillance cameras and license plate readers. There seems to be a consensus that if there'd been cameras in the building and nearby, it would have been easier to track Neves, the incident might have been reported earlier, and other measures like card key entry might even have kept Neves from entering the building at all. But there's also general paranoia about license plate readers, when in fact like cameras, they're everywhere. And they were how Neves was tracked to Brookline and New Hampshire.

Academics and misguided human-rights activists will continue to resist this technology. No doubt Brown will continue to refuse to allow its cameras to feed the Providence real time crime center. I agree with Mauro that Brown and higher education generally will make no changes following this episode, even though it's urgent that they do.