Charlie Kirk's assassination at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday has increased concerns about security and free speech on college campuses, and university police chiefs are thinking through what the shooting may mean for security at their schools.
The event drew about 3,000 people to an amphitheater-shaped space on campus, and authorities believe the fatal shot was fired from a rooftop overlooking the area. Six university police officers were assigned to the event, and Kirk had his own security detail. Still, some attendees said the security presence felt minimal, noting that there were no bag checks as people entered.
"Any time you have this type of violence, it's a game changer," says Richard Beary, who served for more than a decade as police chief at the University of Central Florida. He says there's no formula for staffing or security measures at events featuring controversial speakers. Instead, he says decisions depend on the level of risk.
"You're constantly trying to evaluate the security need versus the freedom on campus. It's a constant balancing act that police chiefs do on a daily basis. And sometimes people don't like it," he says. He recalls that after the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, his department overhauled security protocols for large gatherings and football games.
That tension between safety and free expression has long concerned groups such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Robert Shibley, FIRE's special counsel for campus advocacy, says violence against speakers strikes at the heart of democratic debate. "Whether it's Charlie Kirk or Salman Rushdie ... these folks who are brave enough to come out and talk about their own controversial views in front of large numbers of people, that's a fundamental part of how our democracy is supposed to work," he says. "And there's nowhere that's more important than on college campuses."
Shibley points to FIRE's latest College Free Speech ranking, released just before the Utah shooting. It includes a survey of student attitudes, including small year-to-year increases in the percentage of students who said it was acceptable to shout down speakers (74%), as well as in the percentage who said using violence was sometimes acceptable to silence certain speech, in at least some cases (34%).
During the last decade, free speech groups accused some colleges of using vague concerns about "safety" as an excuse to cancel events that were likely to attract counter-protesters. The phenomenon is sometimes called the "heckler's veto." Now, in the wake of the Kirk shooting, one campus security expert told NPR he worries the new threat to free speech might become the "assassin's veto."
Shibley says he shares that worry.
"The more acceptable people see violence as being, the more likely we are to see people resort to that," Shibley warns. "The real nightmare scenario would be sort of a tit-for-tat escalation, attempting to silence one another with political violence."
But some campus police chiefs don't foresee major changes.
"Controversial speakers and high profile people coming to our campuses — that isn't something that's new for us," says Rodney Chatman, vice president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA). He's also head of campus police at Brown University. He says he expects "a heightened level of diligence around best practices for preparing for those events."
But he doesn't think that necessarily means it'll be impossible to hold large outdoor events involving politically contentious figures.
"Universities are a microcosm of our society. And we still want our colleges and universities to be places where people can come and have an exchange of ideas." Outdoor events may carry risk, Chatman acknowledges, but they should continue with "more effort, more planning, more shared understanding" among organizers and law enforcement.
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