Shortly after taking office in 2023, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley attended a US Conference of Mayors discussion on how cities respond to mass casualty events. The conversation left him unsettled.
Sitting beside his chief of staff, Emily Crowell, Smiley turned to her and said Providence was not ready for a mass shooting. There was no indication that anything was imminent, but he ordered city leaders, public safety officials, and school administrators to begin preparing, anyway.
“He said, ‘It’s not a matter of if, it’s when,’” Crowell recalled Sunday.
That is a sentence no mayor should ever have to utter, let alone plan around.
But it proved uncomfortably prescient shortly after 4 p.m. Saturday, when a gunman opened fire inside Brown University’s Barus and Holley engineering and physics building, killing two students and wounding at least eight others.
Providence is a mid-sized city of fewer than 200,000 people, and the East Side around Brown still feels more like a college neighborhood than an urban center. Smiley, 46, lives near the building where the shooting took place. He was at home watching a Providence College basketball game when the first reports came in. He watched ambulances race by his home to the scene.
What followed was a massive law enforcement response involving more than 400 local, state, and federal officers and a manhunt that ended with a suspect in custody early Sunday morning in Coventry, R.I, about 17 miles south of Providence.
“This is not something we should have to train for,” Smiley said Sunday from a fire station a few blocks from the crime scene. “But we have, including very recently.”
The city’s preparation did not prevent the violence, and no amount of planning can blunt the horror of it. But in the chaotic hours that followed, it did matter.
Smiley’s public presence over the next 12 hours was measured and direct. He provided frequent briefings, resisted speculation, and focused on what officials knew and was honest about what they did not. He encouraged families to attend church Sunday morning even while insisting that Brown students remained sheltered in place because the suspect was not yet in custody.
That approach is consistent with Smiley’s reputation at City Hall: a technocratic, detail-oriented mayor whose strengths are process and preparation rather than soaring rhetoric. It’s a style that has earned him a reputation, fair or not, as cautious and even a bit dull.
In this moment, it worked. Smiley provided a sense of control amid chaos.
During Sunday morning’s press briefing, Smiley nearly cracked. He fought back tears as he spoke about a generation of students who have prepared for active shooters, and he explained that his office had done the same.
In June 2023, according to Crowell, Providence ran a full-scale active shooter exercise in an elementary school, involving police, fire, emergency management, and school officials. The training forced responders to confront grim realities: how to triage victims, how to communicate with the public, and how to reunite families in the aftermath.
Those lessons were reinforced through subsequent tabletop exercises with local colleges and universities, including as recently as this past summer.
No one should feel reassured that a city has practiced for a mass shooting. The fact that such preparation was necessary is tragic all on its own.
But after Saturday’s violence, Providence residents can at least know this: when the unthinkable happened, Smiley was as ready as he could possibly be. And he responded with clarity when it mattered most.
Dan McGowan can be reached at dan.mcgowan@globe.com. Follow him @danmcgowan.