Neural Newscast

This is Neural Newscast. I'm Elias Thorne. Brown University has placed its police chief, Rodney Chapman, on leave effective immediately. That's more than a week after a mass shooting on campus that left two students dead and nine others injured. I'm Lydia Holmes, and Brown's president, Christina Paxton, says this is part of a standard review of campus safety after the attack. She's also been blunt that the shooting has created anxiety, fear, and stress across the campus community. So here's what that review is actually looking at. It'll examine how the university responded the day of the shooting and whether Brown's current safety policies are adequate. Paxson says the school's highest governing body will conduct both reviews. And it's not only internal. The U.S. Department of Education says it's also reviewing Brown's response. That's a second layer of scrutiny, right when students and families are asking for concrete changes, not just statements. A lot of the criticism, um, centers on the speed and effectiveness of the initial law enforcement response. That includes how long it took to identify and apprehend a suspect. Authorities identified the suspect six days after the 13 December attack as Claudio Nives Valent, a 48-year-old Portuguese national who had previously studied at Brown. Officials say Valentay was later found dead in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire. And they also believe he killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor two days after the Brown shooting. No motive has been released in either case." Brown says the suspect entered a building used for engineering and physics programs and fired at least 44 rounds from a pistol at students. The two people killed were identified as Ella Cook, 19, a second-year student from Alabama, and Mukhamad Aziz Yumerzakov, 18, an Uzbek-American first-year student. Axon praised the bravery and dedication of the officers who responded that day, while also acknowledging how shaken the campus is now. And, yeah, that balance is tricky because a community can value frontline effort and still insist leadership answers for preparation, coordination, and communication. There's also this public debate over campus security infrastructure, especially cameras. President Donald Trump criticized Brown for not having enough security cameras after the shooting. Paxton responded that Brown has 1,200 security cameras on campus. So the question isn't only how many exist, it's how effectively they support prevention and rapid response. For students, though, the day-to-day reality is simpler. They want to know what changes immediately, how alerts work, how buildings are secured, and whether the campus police structure is actually set up to manage a crisis on this scale. Campus police... And placing the police chief on leave doesn't answer those questions by itself. It signals a leadership reset while the institution audits what went wrong and what has to change. The outcome of the review and any corrective actions that follow, that's going to be the real measure of accountability. We'll keep tracking both the university review and the federal review and any new information about the timeline, safety measures, and policy updates. If you want more episodes like this, follow Neural Newscast wherever you listen. Neural Newscast is AI-assisted, human-reviewed. You are AI Transparency Policy at neuralnewscast.com.