Dive Brief:

• A new policy announced Monday will see the University of Rhode Island's campus police start carrying firearms.
• The school has been the only public university in the country with campus police that don’t carry firearms.
• The university’s faculty union was opposed to arming the police, citing a lack of evidence showing that doing so would increase public safety.

Dive Insight:

The announcement on Monday by URI President David Dooley came about a year after an incident on the university’s main campus where people reported that someone may be carrying a gun. Campus police reported to the scene within one minute, but had to wait another five minutes for local police, who had guns, to arrive. The report turned out to be a false alarm — no gun was found. In May, the Rhode Island Board of Education voted to allow the state’s three universities to decide for themselves whether to allow campus police to carry firearms.