A new safety role at Rhode Island College comes into sharper focus after Brown shooting – The Boston Globe

Lawrence was recently named RIC’s first emergency management director, a role college leaders had been planning before the December mass shooting across town at Brown University, but which took on new urgency after the tragedy.

Few resumes are better suited to the job.

A 20-year career in the New York Police Department. Commanding officer of the NYPD’s Employee Assistance Unit. A master’s degree from Harvard.

Lawrence got to Rhode Island the way a lot of people do: through someone who grew up here and never really left, at least not in spirit. Her husband, Brooke Lawrence, grew up in West Greenwich, and is director of the town’s emergency management agency.

“I couldn’t imagine retiring in my 40s,” Lawrence told me. “And I couldn’t imagine not giving back to my community.”

Public service has been part of Lawrence’s life for as long as she can remember. A New Jersey native, she dreamed of following in the footsteps of her mentor, a longtime FBI agent. She graduated from Monmouth University and earned a master’s degree in forensic psychology from John Jay College in 2001, shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks.

There was high demand for police in New York at the time, so Lawrence raised her hand to serve. She worked her way up the ranks from patrol to lieutenant, eventually taking charge of the department’s Employee Assistance Unit, a peer support program that helps rank-and-file officers navigate the most traumatic parts of the job. She later earned a second master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School.

“It’s making sure our officers are getting through their career in the same mental capacity as they came on the job,” Lawrence said.

There’s a version of Lawrence’s new job that feels routine, especially at a quiet commuter campus like Rhode Island College. And when Lawrence was initially hired part-time last fall, it probably was.

Then the shooting at Brown University changed the stakes almost overnight.

On Dec. 13, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national and one-time student at Brown, opened fire inside the Barus and Holley building, killing two students and injuring nine others. Neves Valente also killed an MIT professor before he was found dead in a New Hampshire storage unit of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In eerie videos recorded in the storage unit, Neves Valente admitted that he stalked the Brown campus for weeks prior to his attack. He largely went unnoticed by campus security, which led the university’s police chief to be placed on leave and essentially replaced by former Providence Police Chief Colonel Hugh Clements.

Lawrence assisted with the response at Brown. She leads the trauma response team for the Rhode Island Behavioral Health Medical Reserve Corps, which staffed the family reunification center in the hours after the shooting.

RIC’s campus is more enclosed than Brown’s — there are only two major entryways to the college — but there are unique challenges.

For one, it’s technically located in both Providence and North Providence, which requires coordination between multiple public safety departments in both communities.

More specifically, Lawrence noted that every building on campus has the same address, which can present a challenge in an emergency. Lawrence has worked with RIC leadership and local public safety to assign an address to each building.

Lawrence stressed that she doesn’t want RIC to overreact to the tragedy at Brown, and she said campus leaders are committed to keeping the tight-knit community intact.

But she admits that the shooting remains top of mind.

“Every campus community sees what happened at Brown and says ‘please don’t let that happen to us,’” Lawrence said.

Lawrence said everyone at RIC feels a deep sense of responsibility to keep students safe during their time on campus.

And she already feels right at home.

“I want to come home from work every day and feel like I made a difference,” she said.

Dan McGowan can be reached at dan.mcgowan@globe.com. Follow him @danmcgowan.