People Had Been Complaining About Brown's Security For Years? This Is Hard For Me To Believe.

Via The New York Post:

In 2021, Brown University allegedly refused to call Providence police after a caller claimed to have placed bombs throughout campus and was carrying an AR-15 gun, according to the Brown Daily Herald.

The local K-9 unit was finally called an hour later — after the school’s public safety officers spoke up, according to the paper.

But it took Brown another hour to send out an alert to students.

One of the officers later claimed the university went as far as altering its officer’s report of the incident to remove mention of his concerns, and references to the delay.

. . . So far in 2025, security officers have issued two votes of no confidence against the university’s police chief Rodney Chatman and the school’s department of public safety.

A scathing October editorial in the Brown Daily Herald called the problems with the school’s security a “threat to public safety” and said the university was “failing in its obligation” to keep students safe.

Mr Chatman is actually Brown's Vice President for Public Safety and Emergency Management as well as the Chief of Police. He started that job in September, 2021. Prior to that, he had briefly been campus police chief at the University of Utah, where his record was sketchy indeed. According to KUTV,

Chatman previously led the University of Utah Police Department, where his tenure ended in 2021 amid investigations, lawsuits and lingering fallout from the murder of student-athlete Lauren McCluskey.

. . . Chatman was hired in January 2020, more than a year after McCluskey’s murder, replacing former police chief Dale Brophy, who retired as the department faced intense criticism over its handling of the case. Chatman came to Utah from the University of Dayton in Ohio, where he served as executive director of public safety and chief of police.

. . . In December 2020, Chatman was placed on administrative leave after allegations he impersonated a peace officer by beginning work without certification from Utah’s Peace Officer Standards and Training board. The Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office later found insufficient evidence to file charges, noting the university knew Chatman was not Utah-certified when he was hired and that he met the legal definition of a police officer.

. . . Chatman sued the University of Utah alleging retaliation, but a judge did not rule in his favor. He left the university in June 2021 after remaining on administrative leave.

. . . At Brown, Chatman has again faced internal criticism. In October 2025, two campus police unions issued votes of no confidence in Chatman and Deputy Chief John Vinson, citing low morale, staffing reductions, fear of retaliation and failures in safety technology.

. . . Following Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University, which left two people dead and nine injured, Chatman has maintained a low public profile as Providence police continue their investigation. Chatman was not seen on camera at the news conference where local, state and federal law enforcement announced the arrest of their suspect. The university has not said whether his leadership is under review.

Soldier of Fortune has more detail on the controversies at Brown:

The allegations against Chatman were lodged by the International Brotherhood of Police Officers Local 863, which represents 10 Brown University police sergeants. In August, the union issued a formal vote of no confidence in Chatman and Deputy Chief John Vinson, citing a lack of transparency, a toxic workplace culture, and an atmosphere of fear inside the department.

. . . Underlying many of these complaints is what union leaders describe as a “cover-up culture.” Internal reports from 2021 and 2023 allege that Brown police were slow to notify Providence police about significant threats, raising concerns that leadership prioritized institutional reputation over public safety.

. . . Brown University launched an internal investigation into the department’s workplace culture last April, but the probe itself quickly drew criticism. Deputy Chief Vinson was initially involved in the investigation despite past leadership controversies during his tenure at the University of Washington, where he was described as coercive and prone to micromanagement.

The university has since hired CriticalArc, a security software company, to lead the investigation. Reporting by the Brown Daily Herald has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest stemming from professional connections between Chief Chatman and the firm.

The union asked the Rhode Island State Police to conduct an independent investigation, arguing that Brown cannot credibly police itself.

But although some students, as well as Brown's own campus police, have rasied concerns about security, Chatman appears to have been doing pretty much what he was hired to do by the people who actually make the decisions. According to CNN,

In March 2021, a Brown University doctoral candidate wrote an op-ed in the school paper criticizing Brown’s increasing use of surveillance cameras and lack of transparency.

“In the span of two decades, Brown University quietly deployed an expansive surveillance apparatus, unbeknownst to many in the community; it’s well past time we critically examined our University’s pervasive surveillance of College Hill,” John Wrenn wrote.

“It is impossible to cross (or even approach) Brown University without being surveilled,” he added. “I encourage you to try.”

In some people's view, which apparently includes PhD candidates, this is a bad thing. I've already noted here that it's an open question whether Brown actually deactivated its security cameras in response to demands from leftist organizations. So far, we've received no clear confirmation or denial, but CNN is among those who are suspicious:

Law enforcement has released a series of videos from nearby homes and vehicles showing what the FBI has called an “unknown suspect,” but none of those appeared to come from Brown’s own surveillance cameras or from the building where the shooting took place. The shortage of visuals has led to sharp questions about surveillance at Brown.

. . . Pat Brosnan, a security consultant and former NYPD detective, said 1,200 cameras was “almost non-existent” coverage given Brown’s campus area of 146 acres.

. . . Brosnan, who was critical of Brown’s security policy, said the resistance to cameras on college campuses is largely driven by an anti-surveillance ideology rather than cost considerations.

“(It’s) exactly the opposite of what, say, retailers, airports, major stadiums, what they do,” he said. “They figured this out a long time ago. They stopped debating the philosophy and started designing for reality.”

This is a lesson I learned when I was involved in the quixotic Dartmouth alumni trustee movement in the 2000s: in discussions with undergraduates, I learned that they deeply resented not just cameras, but the card-key building entry system. I suggested in vain that such systems, in an environment where unfounded rape accusations take place, can protect people by supplying evidence of where they were and when. No matter, they didn't want this on principle.

Fast forward to 2025, and students (maybe even PhD candidates as well) are slowly and reluctantly beginning to recognize that in the real world, the pros of such systems outweigh the cons. Notwithstanding, according to Fox News,

The shooting at Brown University exposed a major gap for a recently opened "real time crime center" in Providence that costs over $1 million, but didn't include surveillance video from the college campus.

. . . In August, the City of Providence, where Brown University is located, announced it had launched a "real time crime center" that has access to hundreds of surveillance cameras — but none at the Ivy League institution.

Eric O'Neill, a cybersecurity expert and former FBI operative, told Fox News Digital it would have been helpful if Brown University allowed the crime center to use their security camera feeds.

"It certainly would have been nice if Brown had subscribed to the data center because my understanding is that there's real-time monitoring, which would have meant that someone would have seen the activity on the cameras and perhaps law enforcement could have been alerted earlier," O'Neill said.

The problem for Brown is that, as obsevers as diverse as Alex Shieh and the campus police sergeants have pointed out, Brown is a brand, a trademark, an image, and on one hand, it doesn't want the potential for urban crime even to be mentioned in its vicinity. On the other, even though surveillane technology has become a proven crime fighting tool, its use conflicts with the luxury beliefs attaching to academic and upper-class culture.

The result is that Rodney Chatman is precisely the man the powers that be at Brown want in that job. If he was hired from a job where he'd been on administrative leave because he was allegedly unqualified, so much the better, he'll be that much more willing to go with the program at Brown! I very much doubt that he'll leave Brown unless President Paxson and a good many others go as well -- and I don't see this as likely.

The Bigger Problem With Brown And The Ivies

I found the video embedded above in my YouTube feed this morning. While it doesn't specifically note the circumstances, it appears to be the testimony of Alex Shieh. a former Brown undergraduate, before a House Judiciary subcommittee last June regarding rising tuition costs and institutional bloat at Brown. One of the first points he made has been borne out since the 1960s by Ferdinand Lundberg, Alan Dershowitz, and Jerome Karabel:

I'm a legacy student at Brown. I went to a prep school that feeds to the Ivy League. My parents are doctors who can afford the $93,000 a year sticker price. In other words, I'm exactly who the Ivy League was built for. . . . According to The New York Times, the median student's family makes over $200,000 a year. Half the student body comes from the top 5% of earners.

Shieh appears to have dropped out of Brown since his testimony to form a corporate startup, and not long before his testimony, he barely avoided disciplinary action there:

“Elite academia is in crisis because of a refusal to accommodate ordinary Americans and an unaccountable class of bureaucrats who treat universities as corporate brands rather than institutions of learning,” Shieh told Fox News Digital in a statement. “I think we need to rethink what it means to be elite. Today, elite schools are elitist. I’m fighting for them to be elite in a meritocratic sense, where they are filled with the best and the brightest, not the richest and most well-connected.”

Shieh, a rising junior who was cleared of wrongdoing by the university on May 14, 2025, had previously angered school officials by sending a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees identifying himself as a journalist for The Brown Spectator and asking them what they do all day to try to determine why the school’s tuition has gotten so expensive.

This is precisely the problem I had at Dartmouth in the 1960s: I couldn't understand why my schoolmates were so ordinary, when we'd been told we were the crème de la crème. It's taken me the rest of my life to find at least partial answers to that question -- I was a public school kid from the northeastern suburbs who'd gotten in on SATs, grades, and extracurriculars, when as a practical matter, the pool of those admitted from that group is something like 20% of any incoming class.

The other 80% are primarily athletes; legacies; preppies; wealthy foreign students; children of celebrities, politicians, and major donors; and DEI. What makes them special is their parents' power and money; they don't have to be smart. By all indications, one of the two students killed at Brown last week, Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, born in Uzbekistan but a naturalized US citizen after immigrating with his parents, a scholarship student and aspiring neurosurgeon, a public school applicant from suburban Virginia, appears to have been one of the fairly small number admitted on merit.

On the other hand, althogh the other student killed, Ella Cook, went to public school, she lived in Mountain Brook, AL, where the median household income is $191,128, and she was Episcopalian; apparently she wasn't a scholarship student. She was noted as being fluent in French, so I was curious how she learned it so well. According to Chrome AI mode,

Cook had a love for traveling "anywhere — especially where French is spoken". She also worked one summer as a program assistant at an organization that runs summer study programs at universities around the world, which likely provided additional language immersion exposure.

This suggests she had the wherewithal and contacts for frequent foreign travel, which again suggests she wasn't admitted to Brown in the same applicant pool as Umurzokov.

What continues to intrigue me is the two cases that have come to light who somehow didn't make it through the Brown/Ivy program, "John", the former Brown student who is now homeless and lived in the basement of Barus & Holley, and Alex Shieh. Shieh appears to have dropped out in frustration, calling Brown a "fraud" and a "racket".

What continues to puzzle me about "John", whatever the cause of his homelessness, is that he was capable of insightful observation, noticing that something was significantly out of kilter with Claudio Neves Valente, and he was then able to follow through conscientiously enough to track him through the neighborhood, note significant features of his car, and even investigate it carefully enough to discover it had a false license plate.

It's impoprtant to recognize as well that Neves Valente was armed and definitely capable of shooting, which is something "John" must have instinctively recognized about him -- yet he persisted to the point of accosting him to ask what he was up to. Then he reported what he'd found on line and on the tip line, making, in the words of the state attorney general, a remarkably persuasive and articulate case.

Here's my question, and I put it especially to Ivy alumni in particular: how many of your schoolmates, especially those who've gone on to successful careers based on their Ivy credentials, would be capable of doing what "John" did? At this point, in my estimate, I would put that number as not much more than one, "John" himself. No matter what personal qualities may have brought him to homelessness, it strikes me that his combination of high intelligence, ability to read people, abiity to draw important inferences, initiative, fortitude, and communucation skills are something like a putative best possible outcome for an Ivy education. So why isn't he already one of the most prominent Brown alumni? Instead, he's homeless.

It really sounds to me as thougn some corporate mover and shaker, maybe even a member of Brown's Board of Fellows, should take "John" in and give him a very, very close look. The personal qualities we've seen from this guy suggest to me that Brown had some very high-quality material to work with, but it managed to botch the job. How did this happen?

The same applies to Alex Shieh. He's asking obvious questions. Why on earth does Brown cost $93,000 a year, and even students on scholarship can't afford it? This isn't much different from commentators now asking how Brown President Christina H. Paxson makes $3 million a year, when the university was comically unable to protect its students from last week's shooting.

The answers to any questions like this will all involve Alex Shieh's insight: "I'm exactly who the Ivy League was built for." The Ivy League was definitely not built for "John".

Brown Shooter Identified -- There Are Questions

The news that the Brown shooter, who also apparently killed MIT Professor Nuno Loureiro, has been identified as Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente doesn't seem to have been well covered by any media. Resal Clear Politics has nothing on it this morning, nor was it in my Google news feed. This story from the New York Post is probably as thorough as any, but it leaves a great many questions unasked. In the clip embedded above, Brian Llenas, a Fox reporter, posed just two of those many possible questions to the Providence police chief:

Why did it take a citizen to notice a suspicious person right next to Brown University and not the police? And also, how long was the vehicle parked where it was? Was it days, hours, minutes?

The chief's answer reveals how poor his communication skills are -- he just replies in a heavy, almost comical barrio accent, "Some people are more interested than others", which still raises the question of why the police weren't interested -- but that leads to other questions, like why nobody from Brown is taking the lead in answering questions, and why even the Providence police departmemt doesn't appear to have a public information officer, a standard position in police departments, who can take questions like this, because the chief certainly can't.

But for now, let's focus on "John", the homeless man whose cooperation was essential in helping identify Neves Valente.

John met with investigators after his image was shared publicly and said he had an odd "cat and mouse" interaction with the suspect, having encountered Neves Valente in a bathroom in Brown University's engineering building hours before the shooting, claiming his clothes were "inappropriate and inadequate for the weather." John was reported to be living in the basement of the engineering building at the time of the incident, sources with knowledge of the situation confirmed to FOX News.

The first question that pops up is, how can a homeless guy be living in the basement of Brown's Barus and Holley engineering building? Accounts say the building required cardkey access:

Although the building was open, students needed to scan badges to access classrooms and labs, school officials said. But hall traffic on that Saturday afternoon was unusually heavy because of the number of students either taking exams or preparing for them, according to reports.

But how long had "John" been living in the basement? And he'd run into Neves Valente in a bathroom in the building hours before the shooting, such that "John" was able to identify him wandering around the residential neighborhood later on. Had Neves Valente been living in his car for some period and using the bathroom in the Barus and Holley basement? How did both he and "John" get in if there is card access? This, of course goes to the question the Fox reporter asked, how come neither Providence police nor Brown campus police noticed his presence, potentially over a period of weeks?

But there's a second big question: as we see, accounts say that "John" was either a graduate or a one-time student at Brown. How can the economy not somehow find useful work for a graduate of an elite university, especially someone characterized by Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha this way:

“He was incredibly articulate, and his testimony, had we needed it, would not only have been credible—it would have been persuasive. He was as outstanding a witness as I’ve seen.”

This looks like the sort of person any employer would be delighted to have -- he noticed something important, followed up, even at personal risk, and went to a great deal of trouble to get his message across, at which he did an outstanding job. Why is this man homeless? We must assume as well that "John" must owe these qualities in some way to Brown, where his character must have been formed at least in part. Why was Brown unable to put him in a position where these qualities could be properly employed?

I have a lot of questions about "John", and I hope we learn more about him and why his clear abilities have gone unrecognized. Of course, someone who notices something important, follows up, and is conscientious and articulate in making his points isn't always valued as an employee, or even a student. Just sayin'.

The next question I have continues to be why there's so little video evidence from anywhere on the Brown campus. The record of Neves Valente's wanderings is, at least so far, entirely from cameras in the residential area around the Brown campus. But if he was apparently in the area for weeks -- and he'd been a graduate student at Brown decades earlier -- he must have ventured onto the campus as well, but there seems to be no record. Had Brown in fact disabled its security cameras, as has been alleged?

But these are just preliminary questions.

Real Clear Politics Links To Conservative Treehouse

Real Clear Politics generally doesn't link to alt sites, especially those that tend to be conspiracy-theory, as Conservative Treehouse does. But this morning, it linked to a post there from yesterday, Did Brown University Disable Their CCTV Systems?

As originally reported in August 2025, a group of far-left human rights advocates sent a letter to 150 U.S. colleges and universities asking them to disable the CCTV systems to protect “free expression and academic freedom across the country,” because “the Trump administration has launched an aggressive campaign against US academic institutions.”

. . . The Brown University President and school officials have been giving ridiculous answers to questions about the 800 cameras on the campus and the fact that no current footage exists of the shooter walking around inside the campus or inside the buildings therein.

The question is really a simple one. Did Brown University follow the requests of the hardline leftist groups who asked the school to disable the functioning of their surveillance network in order to protect the identity of the students on campus?

Obviously, this potential explanation would answer a lot of seemingly irreconcilable questions about the lack of surveillance footage available to local law enforcement, state police and FBI investigators. The only current footage of the shooter is from privately owned doorbell cameras and CCTV systems from businesses near the campus. No footage of the shooter on campus has been identified.

Against the factual evidence of Brown University receiving requests to disable their surveillance cameras, someone needs to ask the right question.

In an update there this morning, it appears that someone maybe did in fact ask the right question:

During a press conference on Wednesday, a Providence-area radio host, Chas Calenda, directly confronted Brown University officials and law enforcement with information he has received about the school intentionally disabling surveillance systems due to DEI concerns.

The response from university officials and the Providence Mayor indicate Mr. Chas Calenda’s informed accusation and question is directly on target.

Well, no. Here's the video:

However,the questioner speaks barely understandable, broken English, and I had to rely on YouTube closed captions to transcribe his question, which comes at about 49:20 in the video:

The camera in that building that Brown put off because the sanctuary city law that we have, you don't want to recall illegal immigrants, and you don't want to provide the footage to the FBI or immigration authority, one camera in that building, it come out from your detergents [!], they are friend of mine, they are angry at this investigation, that these people in Brown University put the camera off. They can identify that person. You can imagine how the family going to go through.Tell me through this to the media here. You guys putting cameras off and . . .

Unfortunately, the wording was hardly direct, and it didn't ask specifically whether Brown had disabled its security cameras, either at the request of left-wing groups or for any other reason, and it was nearly impossible for a listener to understand in any case. Puzzled, I did a web search on Calenda; he represents himself as an attorney, and in YouTube excerpts from his radio show, he speaks fluent English like a native speaker, so I'm not entirely sure if the questioner was actually Calenda. I hope this can be clarified, but Sundance at Conservative Treehouse doesn't seem concerned at the apparent discrepancy -- nor at the questioner's incoherence. The mayor -- not anyone from Brown -- replied,

We heard from both the Brown police chief and the provost at Brown, who have shared that they have been fully cooperative and shared, uh, been forthcoming with all, uh, data and evidence that they have, uh, City of Providence's experience is the same, which is that Brown has been entirely cooperative and collaborative and fully sharing with us. We will be back here tomorrow. . .

So there was neither a direct question on whether Brown had disabled its cameras, nor a direct reponse from the mayor on whether Brown actually had any video evidence at all to turn over. They "shared" everything they had, which may well have been nothing.

And in expanding the investigation, the one thing police aren't doing is reviewing on-campus footage -- you'd think a major focus might be to scan footage from the Brown campus in recent days to see if the individual, easily identifiable via his height and build, turns up elsewhere without a mask. Nope -- they're still asking nearby residents to comb their ring cameras to see if he wandered farther afield in the hours before the attack.

Police have previously asked for the public’s help in identifying the person of interest seen in newly released videos. They have also urged residents, including those with camera‑equipped vehicles like Teslas, to share any additional footage dating back “at least a week.”

Another question nobody's brought up is whether the investigation has specifically ruled Mustapha Kharbouch out as a suspect. The're making anxious appeals to the public for more video of the pudgy guy who's 5'8" and seems to look something like Kharbouch, but we don't know if they've even talked to Kharbouch. And then there are the details that have leaked out about their investigation of Benjamin Erickson, the "person of interest" who waa detained all day Sunday and finally released:

On Sunday morning, as investigators rushed to prepare a search warrant for a hotel room in Coventry, Rhode Island, FBI Director Kash Patel broke the news on social media celebrating that a person of interest had been detained in the Brown University mass shooting.

Around the same time, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced the man’s detention from a podium, telling residents they can “breathe a little easier.”

It turned out to be the wrong man.

. . . Patel’s announcement, made in a post on X, highlighted the role of the FBI in using cellphone tower data to find the alleged person of interest. By that time, however, some investigators already knew that the person of interest’s cellphone was never identified at the scene of the shooting, casting doubt on the man’s involvement, three people familiar with the investigation told CNN.

Within hours, those doubts grew as investigators determined that tests on shell casings found at the scene of the shooting didn’t match the DNA of the person of interest, two of the sources said.

Two handguns found in the hotel room of the person of interest also didn’t match ballistics of the casings, and a residue test on the man’s hands came back negative, the sources said.

The man detained was released later Sunday.

I 've already pointed out that they didn't even need to take the guy downtown; they could have used hotel security footage and key card data to verify his story that he'd been there all day. Yet again, the police chief and politicians at the press conferences say nothing useful, while "sources" continue to leak. No wonder even "respectable" media like RCP is forced to link to conspiracy theorists.

Another False Alarm?

Via the Geller Report:

As the manhunt rages on, a move by Brown University caused a massive row, sparking speculation that it could be linked to Saturday’s shooting. On Tuesday, users on social media noticed that the university had taken down the profile of a first-year student, Mustapha Kharbouch.

The profile of Kharbouch, where he was identified as a first-year student of International Affairs and Anthropology with a focus on the Middle East, no longer exists on the website of Brown University. On opening the link, users were led to a ‘Page Not Found’ message.

Social media erupted with the revelation, sparking speculation whether the removal was in any way linked to the shooting. However, the University has not officially commented on why the page was removed. No credible reports link it to the shooting.

But this situation is a creature of Brown's own handling of the shooting -- complete silence, except that leaks routinely emerge from the investigation. Mark Halperin, for instance, said this in the video I embedded yesterday:

If I were editing The New York Times, I don't think I'd put it in the paper, but people are telling me that the family of Ella Cook, the Alabama young woman who was a sophomore, has been told that she was the target of what happened at Brown. I have no idea whether that's true, there's other theories about why the person did what they did . . . but if it's true that she was targeted, that's a big story . . .

But it was Halperin's own remarks that drove the whole "targeted" buzz yesterday, because of course, it's a big story. What feeds it, and the Kharbouch story, is complete silence from Brown and Providence civic leadership, while it's strongly implied in Halperin's remarks that someone from the investigation has been talking to the Cook family, but no equivalent public statement has been made regarding whether investigators do in fact think the shootings were targeted.

So nobody knows, except the message being sent is that somebody knows, it's just the public doesn't get to hear it. The same thing happened with the case of Benjamin Erickson Sunday. Providence authorities announced they had a "person of interest" "in custody". But then "sources" leaked he'd "driven 17 hours from Wisconsin". He had guns and ammuntition in his hotel room. No, they corrected the leak, he lived in a DC apartment. Then they leaked his name and they were gonna dig up his mental health history, which was probably extensive.

But then all of a sudden. he's released, no evidence, no reason to hold him, apparently no reason even to leak his mental history.

Then people on social media begin to notice that Mustapha Kharbouch, a pudgy Brown student and strident Palestinian activist, kinda looked like the figure in the grainy security footage and might be the sort of person who'd target people. In response, Brown scrubs his on-line presence and accuses people of doxing him. See something, say something, but not really! We want real tips, not hysterical speculation! We simply can't figure out what the shooter shouted when he opened fire!

Here's the real problem. I worked in the contingency planning and crisis management fields at various times, and all I can say is that Brown is doing it all wrong. It clearly has a crisis on its hands -- as I pointed out, the application deadline for fall 2026 is this coming January 5. This is the worst possible time for prospective applicants to see Brown fumbling its campus security, yet officially, Brown is pretending it just doesn't have a problem.

So, do you want to go to all that trouble to assemble a multi-part application package and include the $80 fee when the place is unsafe? Just reassemble some stuff, edit the text files, and send it off to Cornell, Amherst, Williams, or other safety school of your choice, preferably a rural environment, huh? In fact, in terms of potential damage to Brown's reputation, I would put it, at least right now, close to the 1996 TWA 800 disaster. I ased Chrome AI mode, "Did the TWA 800 disaster damage TWA's reputation?" It answered,

Yes, the TWA Flight 800 disaster severely damaged Trans World Airlines' reputation and finances, leading to lawsuits and public scrutiny, even though investigations concluded the crash was an accident (fuel tank explosion) and not terrorism, but the company struggled under the weight of the tragedy, contributing to its eventual demise.

Brown is already reeling from an agreement with the Trump administration last July to restore merit-based admissions and hiring, adhere to the administration's definition of "male" and "female", refrain from performing gender-reassignment surgery on minors, and discourage anti-Semitism.

The agreement had already pointed out "Brown’s failure to address anti-Semitism and ensure fair treatment for all students" and "urgent concerns about student safety and equal opportunities". Ermerging details of the shooting and surrounding circumstances may focus additional attention on these issues, especially if coverage suggests continuing complacency in the Brown administration.

The best way for organizations to deal with a crisis like this is to appoint a single spokesperson with authority to address all questions, including those that could make the university look bad. The way to address the question of why the universiy had so few cameras that covered the shooting and surrounding campus area, for instance, would be to show the issue was so urgent that security forces are installing more cameras now -- and the head of campus security is leaving, too.

The FBI's response to TWA 800 was perfect, at least for the FBI: it made James Kallstrom the spokesperson, who as a figure of blunt integrity probably bought the FBI ten or a dozen years of prestige following the Ruby Ridge standoff and Waco massacre, although the help he gave the FBI didn't rub off on TWA, who had no equivalent figure to represent it. Kallstrom remains the paradigmatic crisis manager.

Instead, Brown is leaving all public statements to the Providence police chief, Colonel Oscar Perez, a Colombian immigrant who speaks English with a barrio accent; and its openly gay mayor, Brett Smiley, who is married to Jim DeRentis, the city's first "First Gentleman". When they speak, they're flanked by a sign-language interpreter who upstages them completely. As of yesterday, a story in the Providence Journal summarized their performance:

As the hunt continues for the man who shot and killed two students and injured nine others in a Brown University lecture hall on Dec. 13, social media platforms have been filled with anger, frustration and questions about why officials are telling people they're safe.

All of those reactions were encapsulated in this post on Reddit by "Matt," the 33-year-old father of an 11-month-old who recently moved from Providence to East Providence: "So … let me get this straight. A guy just shoots 11 people in one of the tiniest, most walkable cities in the country ... 400 cops and the FBI ... No alerts. People in walking distance of the shooting straight up not knowing anything’s wrong for like two hours. . ."

But this is what we get:

Longtime source in Rhode Island tells me Providence Police are indeed looking into the student whose online presence was scrubbed today. Higher-ups want it close hold. Said that Brown U runs Providence, and Brown president is anti-police

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) December 16, 2025

Higher-ups want it close hold, so they can leak what suits them to leak. I can only think something's going to break wide open here.

I Don't Believe Anything We're Being Told About The Brown Shooting

While the "person of interest" who was detained Sunday in the Brown shooting has been released without charges, nothing that was either released officially or leaked (and almost all of it was leaked) makes any sense. For starters, he was s\taying at the Hampton Inn, a mid-range hotel that normally hosts "road warrior" business travelers. The one in Coventry, RI charges around $100 a night.

This doesn't fit any sort of profile for a weird guy who shoots people. Their living arrangements are either sketchy, or they're still living with their parents. Thomas Crooks was living with his parents; Brian Cole Jr was living with his mother and siblings. Ryan Routh had been living out of his car for several months before he tried to shoot Trump in West Palm Beach. Tyler Robinson was living with his trans boyfriend.

Aiden Hale, the Nashville school shooter, lived with her parents. Robin Westman, the Minnesota school shooter, lived in an apartment with a roommate. None of these people, although some had low-level jobs, could have afforded a $100-a-night hotel. We don't know why Benjamin Erickson was staying at the Hampton Inn, but it seems highly likely that this was work-related travel for a job that was responsible enough for an employer to pay roughly $200 a day for lodging, meals, and car rental, leaving air fare aside. This is a solid citizen, not suspect material. Whatever tip they claim to have received will come out in discovery.

As I noted yesterday, it should have taken law enforcement 20 minutes to review Hampton Inn security footage from the parking lot, hallways, and lobby, as well as his cardkey records, and verify that he'd been at the Hampton Inn the whole day as he claimed. This is Investigation 101 and shows the investigators were astonishingly inexperienced. Instead, they took him downtown and held him until they had no choice but to release him, meanwhile leaking his name, where he lived, incorrect speculation about his travel, and the likelihood that he had a mental health history. Benjamin Erickson deserves a full retraction, apology, and likely a hefty settlement from media and the Providence police.

As of yesterday, there's a whole new story, as Mark Halperin notes above. The first hinky thing here is Mark Halperin. Until last month, he'd been doing a very creditable job rebuilding his reputation after losing his media career due to sexual harassment allegations. His Morning Meeting show with Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine on 2WAY had become a highly popular, serious political commentary -- until both Spicer and Turrentine abruptly quit at the same time, due to unspecified reasons (we may at least assume Halperin hadn't hit on them).

Now we have Halperin resurfacing and claiming "sources" are telling him the Brown shooting was a targeted hit. Well, "sources" were saying Erickson probably had a mental health history, too. Here's the line "sources" are pitching:

Ivy rumor mill says that Ella Cook, one of the victims at Brown from Birmingham, Alabama, was a leader in a small conservative group that was opposed to trans ideology. Cops may have indicated to the family she was specifically targeted in the shooting.

Supposedly, killer entered with a plan and shot Cook in the face first. Cook was doing the review session with her normal person friend group.

. . . Many believe Ella’s opposition to trans ideology may have played a role in her being targeted. That’s what happened to Charlie Kirk, when a pro-trans left winger (allegedly) shot and killed him in front of his family and supporters.

But this doesn't fit any better than the Hampton Inn stuff. Yesterday, the story was that this was an anti-Semitic attack timed to conincide with Hanukkah, like the Australian beach attack. But neither of those killed at Brown, Ella Cook, an Episcopalian, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, apparently a Muslim himself, was Jewish. Whatever the shooter shouted just before he opened fire, "Allahu Akbar!" now seems at best incongruous. So now, there's a new line: Cook was a high-profile conservative.

But Cook was only Vice President of the Brown College Republicans, a group whose membership by all estimates is in the low double digits. Why target just the VP? If you want to make a statement, go for the top. And a poll from earlier this month said that conservatives at Brown tended to keep a low profile:

A fall 2025 poll from The Brown Daily Herald at Brown University indicates that conservative students on campus are far more likely than their liberal peers to self-censor in both social settings and the classroom.

The survey of 1,369 undergraduates found that 78 percent of respondents identify as liberal or progressive, while fewer than 7 percent identify as conservative. The political imbalance influences daily interactions: 72 percent of conservative students reported being afraid to share their political views in social situations.

There's another problem: the killer here strikes me as disorganized, like all the others named above. Why would someone planning a targeted hit do it in a packed lecture hall, dressed in a highly recognizable dark outfit with a mask, shouting a slogan? A professional killer wants to blend in, make the hit quickly, and get out. He doesn't shout slogans; tha's just an additional identifier. A professional dresses to blend in, and the strategy would likely be to walk quickly toward the target on a sidewalk, shoot with a silencer at very close range or maybe stab, and go on walking quickly away, probably before other bystanders even recognize what happened.

For someone to make a targeted hit in a lecture hall, when it sounds like this was an optional review session that the target may not even have planned to attend, and have it involve all the other unnecessary theatrics, just doesn't fit. It involves knowing the target's class enrollments and all sorts of other trouble, when a targeted hit could have been done much more simply and with even greater chance of getting away.

Add to that that this is all coming from "sources", while the Providence police are officially releasing almost nothing about the case -- except that the "sources" are almost certainly within the Providence police.

Rhode Island Officials held a press conference on Monday to provide updates on the Saturday shooting and ongoing investigation as the manhunt for the shooter remains underway.

Witnesses say the shooter “yelled something” before killing two students and wounding nine more, and early reports suggest the shooter shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire.

But Perez wouldn’t tell reporters what he said, claiming, “That’s part of the investigation.”

A reporter even pleaded with Perez to tell reporters what the shooter said to help the public identify him, reasoning that “it’s possible a friend or family member might recognize if the person said something that was significant.”

However, Perez claimed that he could not say, suggesting the case may be in jeopardy if he were to share this evidence.

But if the killer yelled "Allahu Akbar!", neither of his victims was Jewish, and one was Muslim. This points yet again to a disorganized perpetrator who's simply not capable of effective planning. What's unfortunate is that these people often enough just get lucky. I would say as well that Brown University's feckless security systems also contibuted to his good luck -- and it also appears that the Providence police are incompetent at investigation, while they're unable to keep their own management-level personnel from leaking.

The best move will be to take the investigation away from the Providence police and give it either to Rhode Island State Police or the FBI.

Person Of Interest In Cust -- Never Mind!

I linked to several stories yesterday that gave breathless details on the "person of interest" that somehow dissipated almost as soon as they were released. The POI drove 17 hours from Wisconsin to Providence -- well, no, he lived in a DC apartment. He was in custody -- well, no, he was being detained. He may have had an extensive mental health history -- well, who knows, he's been released!

The person of interest detained earlier today in connection with the deadly shooting will be released shortly, Providence's mayor said at a news conference late tonight.

. . . Mayor Brett Smiley said, "The status of safety in our community remains unchanged, and we believe that you remain safe in our community."

Police initially said they were confident the person of interest was the person who opened fire in a first-floor classroom at Brown’s Barus & Holley building yesterday before fleeing.

In fact,

Charges could be filed against a person of interest in the shooting as early as the next few hours, Providence’s police chief, Col. Oscar Perez, told NBC News following a press conference this afternoon.

Perez said the investigation remains ongoing but that police are confident that the man in custody is the suspected gunman. He added he wanted to ensure that all legal requirements are met before charges are brought.

"We're going to work with the attorney general's office to make sure that we have the right legal requirements for the charges," Perez said. "And this is, it's just complex. There's a lot of evidence, there's a lot of witnesses, and so we have to make sure that we have it all tight. And to make sure we have a good case."

Pereze said police cannot hold the person of interest beyond tomorrow if charges are not filed. He said he is hoping an arraignment will take place "sooner rather than later."

The POI was rousted out of bed at the Hampton Inn around 3:45 AM Sunday morning.

Authorities traced Erickson to a hotel in Coventry, Rhode Island. According to the sources, law enforcement banged on the door, ordering him to open the door. Once inside, they asked where Erickson had been that day and evening. He responded he was there in the hotel the whole time.

Here's where things get puzzling for me, a true crime amateur. Even a mid-range hotel like Hampton Inn is going to have security features like cameras in the parking lot, hallways, and lobby and card-key room entry. This means that the law enforcement who rousted poor Erickson out of bed should have been able to confirm or disprove Erickson's alibi that he'd been there all Saturday within about 20 minutes by looking at the securiy footage and the card key activity. If he was in the hotel all day, it would be shown on the video and the card key record. Instead, it looks like they took him down to the station and held him until they had no choice but to release him. Via the first link,

Authorities will shortly release a person of interest who was detained earlier today because the evidence “now points in a different direction,” Rhode Island's attorney general said tonight.

Authorities did not originally specify what evidence they had to justify taking the person of interest into custody. Providence’s police chief, Col. Oscar Perez, had earlier told NBC News that police were confident the person was the shooter.

But Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said at a news conference tonight, at which Perez was also preset, that there is no justification to keep the man detained.

"I think it's fair to say that there is no basis to consider him a person of interest, so that's why he's being released," Neronha told reporters.

So now they're back to square one:

Mayor Smiley is asking area residents and business owners to reach out to police with any footage that might have captured the subject in the Waterman Street video.

“If you have a camera and you are nearby, the video that was released was the corner of Hope and Waterman Streets, and if you are in that area and you have video, you have home video, Ring camera, security camera, you’re a small business owner, please reach out to us,” said Smiley.

Apparently, and incredibly, that one clip at the corner of Hope and Waterman Streets is all Prividence police, or Brown University, have:

Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez carefully worded his answer while responding to a question from a reporter about whether there is additional video and why it hasn’t been released. “What we shared with you the other day is what we have that we could share,” he said. He then went on to say that he didn’t want to answer that there is “no more video” because detectives in the field might find more video, but then finished by saying, “What we gave you is what we have.”

In the 21st century, cameras are everywhere, except in Providence and at Brown. But I linked to a post just yesterday that said Brown had over 800 cameras on campus. Just none of the 800 pointed where they needed it. This is in sharp contrast to the video footage that was quickly available at Utah Valley College and nearby after the shooting of Charlie Kirk.

And this comes as college applicants for fall 2026 are finalizing their choices; application deadlines are next month. Clearly the issue of campus safety will be a factor if they choose to apply to Brown. If it were me, I'd apply to Penn or Cornell instead, or maybe lesser-ranked but still prestigious schools like Williams. Anyplace but Brown.

And this leaves aside the settlements that will inevitably be paid out to the shooting victims, both killed and wounded, and their families. I suspect poor Erickson may have cause for legal action himself. And that even leaves aside the potential damage to Brown's image when the real culprit is identified and he (almost certainly) doesn't turn out to be a white MAGA type from Wisconsin.

You casn see how badly they wanted to track the perp down right away, and how badly they wanted a white MAGA type. In fact, this is going to compound whatever embarrassment they would have had if the shooter had been caught right away but turned out to have been a jihadist. I think I see Brown President Christina Hull Paxson's retirement on the horizon.

FOOTNOTE: I asked Chrome AI mode, "Does Benjamin Erickson, the "person of interest" in the Brown shooting, have cause for legal action against Providence now that he's been released?" It answered,

Benjamin Erickson likely has grounds for legal action against authorities or specific news outlets for defamation or false light. Although he was detained as a "person of interest" following the December 13, 2025, shooting at Brown University, he was released after investigators determined he was not involved.

His name was leaked and widely publicized as a "suspect" or "person of interest" despite never being charged. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha called the premature release of his name "really unfortunate" and noted the difficulty of reversing such public damage.

. . . If law enforcement lacked probable cause for his initial detention at a hotel in Coventry, RI, he could pursue a claim for false arrest or wrongful detention, though "person of interest" status often provides police with broader investigative leeway.

I suspect that failure of police to review security footage at the hotel that would have been exonerating could be a major issue.