3 days ago
How Massachusetts is training campus police to handle hate crimes in 2025
Last year, a student at Berklee College of Music told a Jewish classmate that 'Jews belong in the oven.' And at Smith College, a spray-painted Israeli flag with a swastika replacing the Star of David was found on campus.
The incidents were both part of an increase in antisemitic incidents across Massachusetts, a rise that included college campuses.
As campuses work to better address antisemitism and other hate crimes, college administrators and police chiefs from across Massachusetts got a crash course in understanding trauma and how to confront hate through a program designed in part by Massachusetts State Police.
The program spanned two days at the state police headquarters in Framingham last week, and comes as college campuses across the state prepare to welcome students back amid crackdowns on higher education from the Trump administration and lingering tension over the war in Gaza.
For Massachusetts Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, or MACLEA, President Kerry Ramsdell, the chief of the Endicott College police department, the training couldn't have come at a better time.
'We've seen a lot here in Massachusetts on our campuses, and thankfully, we've done a lot of training and investigating and collaboration already, but it's just sort of continuing to learn and broaden that as we come back,' she said in an interview following the first of 10 modules the program will cover.
State police designed the program with experts from the Rutgers University Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience and the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.
On the first day of the program, numerous officials from the agencies responsible for setting it up spoke to participants, including state police Col. Geoff Noble and Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan.
'We are here to provide any resources that we can, that we have,' Noble told the crowd.
'There are challenging days ahead,' Ryan said, adding that antisemitic incidents surpassed race-based hate crimes in Massachusetts last year. 'But you have the privilege of working in some place where people are there to learn, where they bring really great minds together.'
'You, as part of that institution, can address these problems,' Ryan added.
The state's Executive Office of Public Safety and Security documented 466 hate crimes in Massachusetts last year, down from 561 the year before. But incidents of religious bias went up, with 153 documented in 2024.
Of the 153 incidents involving religious bias, 85% reflected anti-Jewish bias, according to the state's data.
The Anti-Defamation League gave multiple Massachusetts colleges a failing grade for their handling of antisemitic incidents in 2023. In 2024, the organization bumped up the institutions' grades, but indicated more work needed to be done.
On Thursday, much of the first module, led by Robert Czepiel Jr., a former prosecutor in New Jersey, and Brian Christensen, a former hate crimes investigator there, focused on defining trauma and hate crimes for the roughly 100 participants.
Christensen and Czepiel emphasized that not all hate incidents rise to the level of a crime, particularly given freedom of speech.
'When you're dealing with hate crimes, you gotta go that extra step,' Christensen said. 'To prove a hate crime is very difficult. You would have to prove that person did it because of one of the protected characteristics.'
As an investigator, Christensen preached being proactive, trying to step in before incidents of hate rise to the level of a crime. He also stressed the importance of creating relationships in the community, which Ramsdell, the Endicott chief, said was one of the key lessons her department learned amid student protests in the spring of 2024 over the war between Israel and Hamas.
There is a lot of work any department can do before reacting to an incident, she explained.
'Building those trust factors and building those relationships on our campuses and outside ... to help support that if we did react or have something, it would all be about that sort of collaboration is a lesson learned,' Ramsdell said.
While Ramsdell acknowledged it can be difficult to get students to the table, she said engaging directly with them is a major part of the job.
Campus law enforcement officers are trained to go meet and interact with students from the first year they're on campus, rather than waiting for them to come to the department, she explained.
'That's the unique part of our campus law enforcement culture, is that we sort of do that, but I think it's still evolving. It's not perfect and I don't think anyone has the perfect answer to it,' she said.
Tufts University Police Capt. Mark Roche, the organization's vice president, said simply, the standard is to be a human first.
'Establish those relationships before the crisis, so that you're not working to establish those relationships and try to build that trust while there's an ongoing crisis,' he said. 'We're all just lifelong learners.'
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Read the original article on MassLive.
