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Protecting Duke through the Years

The ��ţӰ�� Police Department has been pursuing the mission of safety since the 1930s

When Duke’s current Chief of Police John Dailey was 14 or 15 and still in high school, he came to the ��ţӰ�� Police Department to interview for a part-time position as a traffic monitor. He spoke with a man named Paul Dumas about the job.

Dumas had thick, black-rimmed glasses, close-cropped hair and a brusque, no-nonsense demeanor. In his heyday, he was a commanding presence in the department. Dailey doesn’t remember specifics of their conversation some 40 years ago, but he remembers how Dumas made him feel.

“He could be very direct to people, but had an unbelievable caring for the students, the faculty and staff,” Dailey said. “That was why he was so driven by the mission, and so driven to hold people to very high standards.”

What Dailey didn’t know then – even after he got that traffic monitor position – was that he was glimpsing Duke Police’s past talking with its future. 

Dumas is credited with formalizing the and professionalizing the unit as it transitioned from a handful of security staff in the 1930s to a public safety department in 1971 and then later the ��ţӰ�� Police Department to reflect that officers had commissions and equal authority to municipal or county law enforcement. Dailey, now the Associate Vice President for Public Safety, has led the department since 2009, overseeing tremendous growth of the university and health system reflected in his own unit.

Duke now employs 193 people in the police department, which is responsible for safety and security on the university and health system campuses. As Duke celebrates its Centennial in 2024, its police department is now 53 years old and still strives to fulfill its earliest mission.

“Campus policing, especially at Duke, is probably some of the most complex policing there is in the country,” Dailey said. “We're really just trying to help create an environment so Duke can fulfill its mission – and that's supporting the health care staff, it's supporting faculty and staff on campus, so they can do research, and they can do instruction.”

Duke Police’s beginnings

The earliest law enforcement at Duke was a safety department that was an extension of facilities management. The first mention on record comes from 1939, when there were four officers on staff.

By 1961, that number had grown to 10 – but change was occurring rapidly at Duke and throughout the country. Duke students joined at a Durham Woolworth’s in 1960 in support of Black students at North Carolina Central, and between 50 and 75 students organized a of Duke’s Allen Building in 1969 to bring attention to the needs of Black students. Campus safety at that time was handled by the Traffic and Security Office under Physical Plant operations.

Dumas came to Durham in 1971 from the University of Georgia, and with a resume that would have a lasting effect on the development of Duke’s police department: Dumas served as a chief deputy U.S. marshal whose tasks included the protection of civil rights advocates – including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“A lot of his philosophy and the way he treated people came from that experience,” said Ruby Thompkins, the department’s Senior Administrative Assistant.

Under Dumas’ leadership as the director, Duke’s Traffic and Security Office was renamed the Public Safety Department and included police, traffic, and safety divisions reporting to Business Administration. That was a time of change in policing in many areas, and the same year the city of Durham to form a Public Safety Department.

Bob Dean, a Durham resident, decided to become a police officer after 10 years as an assistant cook for Duke Dining when he discovered he was allergic to celery. Being a police officer was not only safer for him, personally, but it would provide an opportunity to make a difference.

“The majority the people did not trust police, especially people of color who had a bad experience or they knew of someone who could have had bad experiences,” Dean said. “That's why I felt that my calling was on a college campus. I felt like I could make a bigger impact being there, being a person of color on campus.”

And when he became an officer in 1972, he immediately saw how Dumas was working to modernize Duke Police.

“His charge was to make it a more professional department,” Dean said.

‘Committed to diversity’

Thompkins, the department’s Senior Administrative Assistant, started working in the Police Department in 1979 and is currently the longest-tenured employee in the department. When she speaks about Dumas, she does so with affection and the same bluntness she says he was known for.

“He was someone who told it to you like it really was,” she said. “And he supported his employees.”

Dumas also was progressive in hiring minorities and women, influenced by his experiences working with civil rights leaders such as King, she said.

The first Black officers were hired in 1968 (Timothy Dash Jr.) and 1969 (A.B. Washington), just before Dumas arrived, but he was there in 1973 when the first female officer, Rosemary Jones, joined the staff.

And he continued to make hiring Black and female officers a priority.

“Mr. Dumas was really the one that took it from a security department into the police, and he's the one who really recognized and was committed to diversity,” Dailey said. “He's the one that brought in people of color and brought in women when it was really new in the policing world.

“Where we are as a department is because of the early work that he did.”

Duke Police is now 47% people of color and 30% women, Dailey said. Nationally, police departments 14% women and 21% people of color.

Of Duke Police’s five chiefs, two have been Black – including Dean – one was a woman and two have been white.

“In terms of professionalism and trends, we've always been ahead,” Thompkins said. “We've always been a department where other departments will call on us for advice.”

Duke’s police was thought so highly of at the time that North Carolina Central asked Dumas if he would allow Dean to run its police department for five months until a new chief was hired.

Policing a campus … and national title celebrations

At Duke, policing is unique. Not only are officers charged with caring for thousands of employees and students, but they’re also responsible for the health system and the millions of people who go through the doors of the hospital each year.

When Duke Police began requiring metal detectors scan every visitor to ��ţӰ�� Hospital in February 2023, it anticipated it might scan 1.5 million people in a year. It ended up scanning 3.5 million people.

Other policing challenges include providing security for national and global dignitaries who visit the campus, people such as former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and most recently, Minnesota Gov. and Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz.

And then there’s the need to ensure big-time basketball games – and national championship celebrations – are safe. Documents in the ��ţӰ�� Archives show security for a basketball game in 1976 cost about $600. Today, it’s closer to six figures and about 150 officers (with help from city of Durham Police) provide security for each game.

When Duke students held a bonfire after the men’s basketball national title in 1991, Duke Police was caught off-guard.

“It took a lot of manpower to cover the bonfires after the game,” Dean said. “The game itself was fine. But once the bonfire started – oh man. It didn't take long to really get out of hand, and it was real challenging.”

It was a 10-to-15-year process to land on the current procedure where permits are required for victory bonfire celebrations, and Duke Police worked closely with Student Affairs to find a solution that was acceptable to everyone.

“We worked with Duke Police, and we worked with the local fire department to come up with ‘planned chaos,’” said Sue Wasiolek, Duke’s former Associate Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students. “We put out very clear communication to the students that came from the Executive Vice President's office so that they understood the rules and the regulations.”

The working relationship between Duke Police and Student Affairs has been a strong one since Wasiolek began working with students in 1979.

“There’s always been a clear recognition that the police were there to respond to crime, we were there to respond more to student behavioral matters that were in violations of the code of conduct –  and yet those two sometimes go hand in hand,” Wasiolek said. “They are part of the educational process here, to certainly enforce – but to not lead with that unless it's necessary.”

Interacting with students and ensuring safety of all visitors to the hospital is something unique to policing at Duke.

“Part of our mission says we help educate and heal,” Dailey said. “We understand people are coming here when they are at their worst for the hospital. We understand that sometimes a student can be making a pretty poor decision at two o'clock in the morning, and we're not necessarily here to call them out on that by arresting them.

“That's part of the uniqueness of doing policing on a college campus, and that's why it's so complex. It's not easy. It's understanding more about why someone may be acting the way that they are or understand that this is a certain moment in time, and this is not how they normally are.”

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