In response to Thursday's false alarm regarding a report of an armed man on campus, a group of students, outraged by what they perceived to be racial undertones prompting the incident, organized a poster campaign.
A Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) security alert issued shortly before 4 p.m. on Thursday to the Tufts community described in detail a man reported to be carrying a silver handgun on Professors Row roughly 90 minutes prior.
After the alert was issued, the individual called TUPD to explain that he had been carrying a ratchet wrench. Confirming the individual's identity, TUPD issued a follow-up e-mail roughly one hour later, explaining that the situation had been resolved.
Upset by what they considered to be racial issues motivating the report of the incident, a group of students put up posters around campus the same evening and into the weekend. The posters, placed on buildings and signs throughout campus, have sparked discussion and debate, even prompting various counter-campaigns aimed at exposing perceived weaknesses in the original posters' message.
The poster design features two hands, one white and one black, holding identical adjustable wrenches. The word "wrench" is printed under the white hand, while the black hand bears the caption "gun."
Senior Hameto Benkreira is one member of the group that spearheaded the initial poster campaign. He said that the group formed spontaneously based on common interest.
"We're not a formal student organization, we're not a class, we're not a [Tufts Community Union (TCU)] group. We just came together," Benkreira said.
The goal of the posters, he said, was to spark dialogue among members of the Tufts community about the effects of race on implicit assumptions.
"We're really trying to reach everyone, and that's our most fundamental and most basic goal," he said. "All we're trying to do is get people to talk about this more."
Benkreira affirmed that the posters were not designed to criticize the individual who reported the incident.
"Clearly, there's racial implications involved in this," he said. But "that doesn't mean the reporter was racist," he added, saying that the caller was "trying to protect campus safety."
Junior Laura Kroart, who was also involved in putting up the posters, agreed that the efforts were not designed to point fingers.
"[The campaign was] not meant to call out an individual, to say that this person is a racist … but that we should start a dialogue about the realities of stereotypes in American society," Kroart said.
Still, when asked if race was the motivating factor behind the call, Kroart said that was "impossible to prove, but … impossible to disprove."
Students involved in the effort distributed or posted 1,000 of the posters throughout campus by Sunday, according to Benkreira. Their strategy, he said, has been successful so far.
"I think it's been effective," Benkreira said. "We're sort of setting a precedent in how we've gone about reaching the community."
Benkreira hopes to meet with Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman to discuss the matter this week.
But not all students felt the same way about the posters. Senior Austin Field found the posters' tone confrontational.
"It's worth having a conversation if that constitutes racism or not, but I think there's a way to do that where people are receptive, and there's a way that makes people instantly defensive and confrontational," Field said. "I think the posters fall more into the second category — making people feel attacked."
Freshman Max Goldstein produced posters of his own in order to counter what he saw as a problem with the original posters' depiction of the tool in question. Held in a way that would produce the clicking sounds described in the alert, a ratcxhet wrench more closely resembles a firearm, Goldstein said.
"There's actually a lot more similarity between the gun and the wrench than the posters portray," he said. "The posters that are out provide misinformation about what actually happened."
"I'm not saying that we shouldn't have a dialogue about race," he added. "But it needs to be based in what actually happened."
Senior Tyler Cooper felt that the campaign could deter students from reporting potentially dangerous sightings in the future.
"We're risking campus safety if we attack the people who call in activity that they think is suspicious," Cooper said. "We don't want to be scaring people away from making future phone calls about security risks."
Cooper believed that the reporter's mistake was reasonable. A ratchet wrench, different from the adjustable wrench pictured in the posters, "could pretty reasonably be misconstrued as a gun if you only saw it for a brief second," he said.
TCU President Sam Wallis, a senior, met with Reitman and TUPD Capt. Mark Keith on Friday to discuss the issue. The decision to issue a security alert in the first place was jointly made by TUPD and university administrators, he said, adding that such decisions are reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
Associate Professor of Psychology Sam Sommers e-mailed his students after the alerts were issued on Thursday because the incident fit the subject material of one of his classes. He described the incident as falling under "weapon bias," referring to the subconscious tendency to see objects as weapons in the hands of one race or gender over another.
Everyone involved in the incident — from the caller to the authorities — did everything right, he said.
"Based on the details I know, no one did anything wrong," Sommers told the Daily. "If you think you see someone with a gun, you should call the police. If you are the Tufts police and someone calls in a report, you should contact the senior leadership of the university. And if you are the senior leadership of the university and you receive a credible report of a public safety threat, sending out an e-mail seems perfectly legitimate."
Still, he agreed that the incident raises the importance of asking questions about race and implicit perceptions.
"On the other hand … I think it's totally legitimate to ask the question, ‘Would this event have gone the same way if it had been someone else carrying a wrench on Professors Row — would the event have transpired at all?' I think that's a perfectly legitimate question to raise, and scientific data suggests it would have been less likely to happen."
