Photo Illustration by Jason Luong | The Signal
The university has stripped Connie Sampson of her badge.
On March 22, after a 20-year tenure as chief of Georgia State’s campus police force, Sampson was relieved of her police position so she could focus on the school’s building services.
University President Mark Becker announced the shift in leadership, which put GSUPD Deputy Chief Carlton Mullis in the chief seat, the day after a drug deal outside Piedmont North escalated into a brief firefight that landed both shooters in the hospital.
Mullis, a long-time colleague of Sampson, will act as the school’s top cop while the university sifts through other successor options.
GSUPD Maj. Anthony Coleman told The Signal that both gunshot victims, one of whom was a Georgia State student, are in stable condition and charged with violent felonies.
However, Becker said in his letter of Sampson’s dismissal, GSUPD drug its feet when alerting students of Monday’s gunfire fiasco.
“Many students and parents expressed concern they first heard about the incident on the news rather than from their own university,” he said. “I am disappointed we did not promptly and effectively communicate what was happening last night as information became available.”
And, Becker said, the notion that the danger likely arose because a student was getting away with selling weed from his dorm is inadmissible.
“While the suspects were taken into custody and charged shortly after the incident, these types of crimes are completely unacceptable and rightfully alarm our community,” he said. “I was particularly disheartened to learn that one of our own Georgia State students allegedly created the situation by selling drugs to visitors to campus.”
According to Mullis, these concerns should be better addressed by a tentative reevaluation of GSUPD’s crime prevention unit, which could be restructured to more effectively allocate forces.
Still, Mullis said Sampson had always been a revered police officer during and before her carεer as chief.
“Chief Sampson was a highly respected part of the police community,” he said. “We also worked together at the University of Georgia for 10 years.”
Becker said the university is “immediately changing our processes for timely notifications and emergency alerts.” More on what that means after chats with the interim chief, Mullis.
Mullis said those talks will be underway in days to come, as the police need to figure out, “how can we better communicate with our community to provide accurate and timely information in the best way possible? Is that Facebook? Twitter? It’s probably not Instagram,” he said.
During the March 21 shootings, university police sent out a campus alert roughly an hour and a half after the violence concluded.
The March 21 alert which filled in clueless students and onlookers of the recent happenings was what’s called a Clery Act notice.
“It was timely for what it was for,” Mullis told The Signal. “There are legal requirements for if there’s an active emergency on campus that we need you to do something: shelter in place, don’t come to campus, go home. Ice storm impending, tornado warning, those kind of things. And there is a Clery notice which is ‘something’s happening and we need you to know about for your general safety. It’s not an active threat.”
Photo by Jason Luong | The Signal
“By the time we found out about it and responded at about 9:30 [p.m.], it was over,” he said. “There was no more threat to the campus, so it really didn’t qualify for an emergency notice. By the time we got all the facts together an hour later, for some people needing to know what in the world is going on outside my window, an hour was too long.”
But police are learning — and not just from fuming parents on social media — that there could be other appropriate times to inform the Panther family of campus excitement, not just when they need to act.
“What we’re understanding is that there’s a middle ground in there for a significant campus event as Monday night was,” he said.
Georgia State student Sam Few said, if Becker’s decision to oust Sampson from her policing position proves beneficial to campus cop practices, then it was the right choice.
“I want a safe environment to learn in, along with a campus I walk freely on without feeling like I’m going to be harmed,” he said. “If this action is a step towards that, then I think it’s a positive transition forward.”
However, Claire McGrath, another student, said she doesn’t think the president’s quick reaction to Monday night’s violent drama was entirely warranted.
“I think President Becker is right to start taking more action, but I don’t believe it was justified to just demote someone of that power [as a response],” she said. “I think there could have been a more appropriate action taken.”
