People ask me why a university would need its own police department. Well, I worked for many years in university policing. My agency provided law enforcement services to a metropolitan campus of over 33,000 people, within a large city of about a million people. At one point during the campus’s growth, the university made it mandatory that all freshmen live on campus. They made this rule to fill the notoriously empty residence halls and increase campus funding, strictly a money decision, but apparently, no one thought to check how many incoming freshmen we would have, as the number of freshmen exceeded the number of rooms available.
So, in the long tradition of throwing good money after bad, the university decided to lease an entire condominium complex about four miles from campus. The Chief of Police told the university that he would need to hire five more police officers to provide service to this area (one per shift and one extra to cover absences). The university said that they would depend on the city police to respond to any calls for service from the condo complex, as they simply couldn’t afford to staff the additional police officers.
About one month into this lease, Housing Services received a complaint from a resident at the condos. We’ll call the complainant”Brad.” Brad was on parole and was a large man, about six feet and 250 pounds. Brad was sharing a room with a smaller, nerdier roommate, whom we will call Doug. Brad said that one night, while he was asleep, Doug snuck into his bedroom, climbed into Brad’s bed, and began to fondle his genitals. Brad woke up and while his immediate response was to punch Doug into a coma, he decided violence would only send him back to prison, so he called the police.
The city police responded and their first question was, “Do you want to press charges?”
Brad thinks, well, I don’t want to go through the legal system, I’m on parole, that could backfire on me, so he says, “No, I just want this documented.”
The city police wrote a one paragraph report noting the date, time, location and that one roommate had “inappropriately touched” the other roommate. They had many, many other calls to get to, where people actually wanted to press charges.
Housing Services had come to expect police reports from us that were detailed and inquisitive, providing the information that they needed to respond to complaints, even when people did not want to press criminal charges. When Brad made his complaint, Housing Services obtained a copy of the city police report. They then asked the university Chief of Police how to get the rest of the police report narrative. He told them, “That’s it.”
Housing officials were very upset by this and couldn’t understand how a professional police agency (the most professional, if you listen to the city’s spin doctors) could write such a worthless police report. Various university police personnel explained to them at various levels and at different times, that the city police had more important things to do than to complete a full criminal investigation for an incident that was going…let’s see, checking the old, AAA roadmap of life…nowhere. By their perspective, it was a stupid call that didn’t warrant a police report at all, except that the reporting party wanted some documentation.
Housing then asked if university police officers could go and investigate this incident. The Chief said that it did not happen within our jurisdiction, that would require a change in the memorandum of understanding with the city, in which we had specifically assigned them responsibility for the condos. So Housing Services had to do their own damn work.
And that’s one (of many) reasons why universities have their own police departments.