Of course the campus police were involved. Or at least, they should have been. To the extent that there’s a travesty there, it’s that they weren’t involved enough. Do you think that the police shouldn’t have been involved?
I think the problem here is most campus police departments are, at best, not prepared to investigate serious crimes like sexual assault. At worst, campus police departments might be more interested in sweeping things under the rug to avoid embarrassment to the college/university than they are to capturing and prosecuting criminals. In some states, like Maine I think, the local police don’t investigate murders it’s the state police who are in charge. Obviously Maine is a small state, so that might be easier for them to do, but perhaps other states should consider passing laws limiting what crimes campus police can investigate.
I completely disagree. Campus police seem to be a scam. This was the whole point of my thread about churches and schools bypassing the legal system.
If I was a parent with a kid about to start university, I would tell her (especially her in this case) to ignore school authorities if she was raped. I would want her to call the actual, real police.
No institution should have its own legal system and powers.
I think that the campus police shouldn’t have been involved. If you happened to be working at Bloggins Engineering Systems and you got mugged in a stairwell, would you call the Bloggins police force? I would assume that you would not. A university is no different.
And why is such a thing allowed to exist at all?
I’m going to assume this isn’t a rhetorical question. They’re allowed to exist because the law allows them to exist. But that’s a circular answer leading us back to why. Let’s look at it from a cost perspective. Texas A&M has a combined student, faculty, and staff population of roughly 95,000 while College Station as a whole has a population of about 130,000. (There’s obviously going to be some college students, staff, and faculty living off campus.) If you’re a tax payer in College Station, you might not want to foot the bill for College Station PD to operate on campus, so it’s great the university is taking care of it.
It could be that in some jurisdictions the local police department is incapable of patroling and responding to emergencies at the university without stretching themselves to thinly. State College (town name) in Pennsylvania has about 41,000 undergraduates while the University of Pennsylvania has about 40,000 undergraduates. State College has 55 officers while the university has 121.
I have mixed feelings about campus police, but their existence isn’t completely outrageous to me. I can see why they’re around even if I think something needs to change.
Of course it depends. Some campus police are well-trained and funded, and operate with similar authority as (and sometimes in tandem with) municipal police. Other times they are the equivalent of mall cops or act as thugs working for the school. I don’t know what kind of organization was at Cornell.
Colleges don’t pay municipal taxes?
Not generally, no. Even private colleges are generally considered protected non-profits and the public schools are exempt as government entities. For profit schools ARE taxed. So Harvard, private, non-profit - no taxes. UC Berkeley, public, non-profit - no taxes. University of Phoenix, private, for profit - they get taxed.
It can get complicated though if say a private non-profit owns a commercial venture as well. Then that part of the college might well get taxed.
Historically it was not necessarily so. In the late 1970s, if you were caught by the campus police at, say, MIT or Wellesley (examples chosen because I know them well during that time frame) smoking pot … you’d get let off with a finger-wag. No record, no consequences - certainly no expulsion from school or jail time.
The “real” police could ruin your life for the same offense.
So, campus police as an alternative to state-authorized police do not necessarily suck. If they are inappropriately laissez-faire with respect to sex offenses, then yes - they suck in that particular dimension. But not simply because they exist at all.
Actually, not. Private corporations (generally?) don’t have police forces with sworn law enforcement officers, and some universities do.
When was going to school, I worked for a while in the school security, which was separate from campus police. We would coordinate things but they were law enforcement and we were not. There were maybe 25,000 students but a lot of us lived at home or off campus.
It was much better having a police force dedicated to the university because they generally had different issues than the city did.
Both the city and the university were pretty low crime rates. There weren’t many reported rapes (in the 1980s) so I don’t know how well the detectives would have handled cases like Cornell. The frats and sororities were all off campus and handled by the city police at any rate.
I knew many of the police officers and never got the sense that they would be sweeping things under the rug to make the school look better.
Don’t have experience at other schools.
It seems a bit bizarre to make a decent point about rape culture then drop this into it:
Because you know what rape culture involves? Dismissing people’s experiences, saying stuff like if they didn’t like it, why didn’t they do something about it?
I’m not male, but I’ve had multiple guys tell me about assaults that have happened to them, mostly when I worked security, presumably because I made it clear that I actually did think it was important. Take one guy- early 20s, 6’ish, also worked as a boxing trainer. Nice bloke, one of my favourite workmates. He got backed into a corner and groped by a bunch of middle-aged women on a hen night (bachelorette party in US) while asking them to follow venue rules at a show we were both working at. You’re really saying he could just ‘fall over on them and that would be the end of it’? He would have been out a job, likely arrested and blacklisted.
In reality, there’s actually very little a guy can do in that situation. People stood around laughing watching it happen, other staff made jokes about him ‘getting lucky’ for the rest of the night. He was really really upset and humiliated. I wound up taking over dealing with them, and the drunks spend the rest of the night whinging at me about ‘taking their toy away’ and calling me a spoilsport, because it was ‘just a bit of fun’. He was a good looking guy, it was not the only time something similar happened to him in that job.
If it had been me being backed into a corner and groped by a bunch of drunk guys, I have no question that the same work colleagues that stood around laughing would have dived in and kicked seven shades of shit out the gropers and would have got into no trouble for it. On the other hand I also suspect the same guys- with a couple of exceptions, including the guy who got groped- would have been defending the guys in the Cornell incident.
Rape culture is complex, and while yeah, I’m sure most of the guys bringing it up are just looking to point score not actually looking for support for a traumatising incident, assaults on men are real, physical strength is not actually all that helpful in stopping it, and treating it as bullshit is just perpetuating a slightly different flavour of rape apologism.
One comment I’ve seen from a lot of different people in discussions of this case is that you can’t do that. If a crime occurs on campus, you must deal with the campus police. Local police departments won’t even take the report. How true that is, and how widespread, I don’t know. But multiple people claim to have experienced exactly that, even for serious crimes, including sexual assault.
The campus police are the actual, real police. And if they’re competent at their jobs, then they should be especially well-suited for investigating and prosecuting sexual assault, because that’s an unfortunately common category of crime on college campuses. Now, they might or might not be competent at their jobs… but that’s also true of the city or county police forces. There’s no reason, a priori, to assume that the city police would be better than the campus police.
It’s not “their own” in the sense you’re describing. A campus police force are not employees of the university. They’re employees of the state, like any other police force.
Now, if we’re not talking about a campus police force, but just campus security, then what you’re saying makes sense. Those are employees of the school, and don’t have the authority to prosecute crimes. But a campus security service and a campus police force are not the same thing.
Yeah, nobody should be claiming that female-on-male sexual assault is anywhere near as common as male-on-female. But it does happen, and when it does, it’s every bit as wrong, and should be taken every bit as seriously, as male-on-female. Or male-on-male or female-on-female.
Like any other small police force, the detectives at my school had less experience than the city police because they dealt with less serious crime. If there had been a murder then I think it would be turned over to the city or state.
At my university, while they were state certified sworn law enforcement officers, they are university employees.
The chief reports to the university public safety officer who reports to administration, in a similar manner that police chiefs of cities report to the city administration.
Other universities could be different.
Well, that’s actually my point - if a private corporation decided to set up such a thing, I couldn’t see society, or the employees, tolerating it.
Edit: from reading other responses about my campus police comments up thread, I may be very wrong about what I’ve said. Unfortunately, ISTM from numerous articles that I have read over the last thirty years, that churches and universities get a pass on serious crime.
For the record, some companies do have their own private police departments, though their powers are generally more limited than local and state police:
I don’t dismiss others’ experiences except when the apologists use them to rationalize women being assaulted.
Obviously it does happen, as your examples show, however, whereas (I assume) most women have to be on guard most of the time, I don’t.
This, exactly.
Definitely true at the school MiniMouse is at. There was a girl drugged at a frat house last year, and the Big City police department responded, but then just waited for the Big U Police Dept to interview her.
Do you know if there was a satisfactory conclusion?
No way to know. Neither police department, nor the school seems to ever say anything about any crime where the accused is a student.
Everything we know is from student social media.