Nearly three months after two Duke University Police Department officers mistakenly arrested Trinity freshman Calvin Harding, University administrators revealed this week that the pair-Paul Taylor and Carol Campbell-were suspended without pay for their part in the incident.
The suspensions were the second-stiffest penalties the officers could have received, said Executive Vice President Tallman Trask. The four degrees of "progressive discipline," he explained, are oral warning, written warning, suspension and termination.
Although he called the punishment "serious," Trask said he could not comment about the length of the suspensions due to employee privacy protection laws. He added that he has heard little public discussion about the officers' punishment during the past few weeks.
"It's sort of old news in that regard," he said. "I don't think [revealing the punishments] substantially compromises confidentiality-we don't speak in any more detail about it."
Taylor, who was a detective sergeant at the time of the incident, now holds the rank of sergeant. Although Lew Wardell, assistant chief of DUPD, explained that sergeant is a lower rank than detective sergeant, he refused to comment about whether or not Taylor was demoted as a result of his behavior.
"An officer is an officer is an officer," Wardell said.
The punishment of Taylor and Campbell stems from the April 7 incident in which the two officers handcuffed Harding and unlawfully detained him for 30 minutes at the Fuqua School of Business-where he was employed as a work-study student-after another employee at the school falsely identified him as a suspect in a rash of robberies that had struck the school during the year.
Harding, who is black, filed a complaint with DUPD, which then conducted an internal investigation and concluded that the officers-who are both white-had committed numerous procedural errors; investigators also ruled, however, that their actions were not racially motivated.
"Knowing that the police officers involved in my arrest were punished severely hasn't brought me the kind of comfort I initially thought it would," Harding wrote in an e-mail message to DUPD Chief Alana Ennis following the incident. "I just can't help but think that the actions the department has taken are intended to placate me and lessen its liability for the treatment I received."
News of the treatment Harding received at the hands of DUPD outraged many in the University community. Last month, 20 black faculty members penned an emotionally charged, four-and-a-half page letter to President Nan Keohane, in which they demanded a public disclosure of the punishment handed down to Taylor and Campbell. Trask said he presented the progressive discipline scale-and the category into which the officers' punishment fell-to the professors during their May 19 meeting with Keohane and other top-level administrators.
Keohane, who recently wrote a response to the signatories of the initial letter, acknowledged the difficulty in achieving a proper balance between the gravity of the situation and the sanctity of the confidentiality rules.
"I think that there's a real problem... between the values of confidentiality overall and a feeling of particular need to know in this particular case in order to reconcile and move on," she said. "What I have said to the group in this letter that I have just finished working on is that, they had asked in their original letter for some kind of statement from me about how unacceptable this behavior was, some stronger statement than they had yet seen. And I think it's appropriate to reiterate... how unacceptable such behavior is in the context of some of the other hopefully more positive things we want to say."
But the revelation of the officers' punishment in general terms-suspension without pay-has done little to assuage the sentiments of frustration that still linger.
"Calvin Harding didn't have the luxury of confidentiality," said Kenny Williams, professor of English and a co-signer of the letter to Keohane. "His name was blasted all over."
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