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Paul, Weiss’s Independent Review of Syracuse University Department of Public Safety Yields Recommendations for Community Building
- Client News
- February 22, 2021
Practices
As reported by CNN and others, Paul, Weiss released an independent review of the Syracuse University Department of Public Safety (DPS) following a year-long investigation assessing how the department interacts with members of the university community and, specifically, officer interaction with students during campus protests.
The final, nearly 100-page report provides 23 recommendations for the department, including the creation of a community review board to review appeals of complaints against DPS officers and provide comments on proposed changes to the DPS’s standard operating procedures and training protocols. Other recommendations include fostering DPS’s focus on community policing; improving communications with the campus community about hate-related incidents; improving the DPS complaint system to increase officer accountability; changes to hiring, ongoing training and performance evaluation processes; and addressing future campus protests. In accepting the report’s conclusions, Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud directed administrators to implement all the recommendations.
To conduct the review, a Paul, Weiss team, led by litigation partner Loretta Lynch, interviewed 77 witnesses, including students, DPS officers and employees, administrators and faculty members, and examined DPS’s response to the bias-related incidents that occurred during the 2019-2020 academic year. The team also reviewed a broad range of DPS’s documents and data related to the incidents, including video footage from student protests; Internal Affairs investigation files; use-of-force incident reports; and DPS training materials.
The Paul, Weiss team included litigation partners Loretta Lynch and Michael Gertzman, and counsel Justin Lerer. The team also relied on the assistance of a law enforcement expert.