Now, Brown had had a whole lot of drug use and drinking and partying, but it was not a Big Ten football school with a tradition of officially sanctioned, campus-wide bacchanals each weekend. Nothing I’d seen during my college years quite prepared me for the sheer insanity of a big football program home game. Tens upon tens of thousands of people, of all ages, were shit-faced drunk. Frat row was in a state of debaucherous pandemonium, with dozens of students passed out on lawns and outdoor couches, amid no small amount of vomit, urine, and broken bottles. I mean, it was fun, I guess. Or at least it looked like it would be fun if you were a participant, if you woke up and started pounding beers and found yourself, dressed in red, gleefully among the throng. I’m sure it was amazing.
But I was working on the weekends, riding my bike through the crowds, and I couldn’t but help feel alienated from the entire enterprise. I also couldn’t help but imagine how this scene would play out if the crowds weren’t overwhelmingly white. I mean, would all this (mostly harmless) mayhem meet with such enthusiastic tolerance if it were a hundred thousand drunkas-hell black folks streaming through downtown Madison? Something tells me, no chance.
The couple I was staying with had season tickets to the games, and while they rolled their eyes a touch at some of the excesses, they were part of a community, and they understood and embraced that this was a community ritual, a norm collectively arrived at. So they did not panic about the absolute carnival of disorder that game day represented. It was, in its own way, orderly disorder. Which is one way of describing four years at college.
Of course, it’s not always that easy. Large universities tend to exist not simply behind fortressed walls but over a large area that mixes official campus buildings, unofficial parts of the school (houses and apartments rented by students), and residences where nonstudents live: the “decent folk,” as Kelling and Wilson call them.
And if you are raising your family in the neighborhood of a large, intoxicated student body, you probably wish you could somehow get a little “broken windows” policing. Sarah Koenig, a producer for This American Life and Serial, documented the trials of her family living in a house in State College, Pennsylvania. She showed how onerous it was to be constantly dealing with drunken young people peeing on your lawn, pulling traffic signs out of the ground, and carousing at all hours of the night.
By and large, though, campus police and college towns’ police departments are not guided by the “broken windows” ethos; if they were, State College, Pennsylvania, Madison, Wisconsin, Bloomington, Indiana, and Boulder, Colorado, would all be police states. I’ve corresponded and talked to dozens of people about their experiences with campus cops, and there are certainly examples of cruelty and harshness, even the kinds of horrifying fatal shootings of unarmed students that have made headlines. As with any job where someone has a badge and authority over other people, there are more than a few sadistic assholes who get off on ordering people around.
At some schools the division of labor between benign pastoral care for unruly drunken teenagers and actual public safety is institutionalized with two different kinds of forces. At Johns Hopkins there are, a junior told me:
the HopCops, who don neon yellow jackets, and the Campus Security, who wear policeman-like uniforms. The HopCops exist solely for student safety and are incredibly progressive. They don’t care if you’re hammered or high or anything as long as you’re not hurting anyone. One of them caught me smoking MJ on top of a campus building and told me it was his favorite spot too and to make sure that none of the Campus Security saw me: pretty chill. The Security, on the other hand, are killjoys, often raiding the quads to confiscate alcohol on sunny days. I was ambushed by one after he watched me and a buddy depart a liquor store and head to the dorms. He was waiting at the elevator and told me he saw everything and to take the beer elsewhere.
You can’t help but notice here that even the harsher force doesn’t write a ticket or make an arrest for underage drinking. But that’s not necessarily how those outside the campus community encounter those same officers.
Campus police stand as watchmen for the assorted hijinks of rebellious and often out-of-control young adults. They break up parties and make sure no one gets hurt, as opposed to bringing the hammer of law and order down on every drunk underage student they encounter. That is the role they play in the campus community. But they are also there to keep the outside world at bay. They are sentries who stand on the wall.
Many students of color have told me they found their race automatically led campus cops to think they were outsiders rather than members of the community. Almost every black and brown student, it seems, has a story about being profiled by campus cops as infiltrators. In 2004 at William and Mary, where Dani Perea went to school, she and her friend, who is black, were studying in the library and laughing at something when a
campus cop materialized at our table and asked if we were guests of the college. . . . He told us we weren’t supposed to be there unless we were guests of the college. . . . He said something like, “You’re going to be in trouble if you don’t tell me what you’re doing here.” . . . My friend pulled out her lanyard with her student ID and showed it to him and told him that we were students. He yanked it out of her hands and told me, “Yours, too,” and scrutinized these things like they were foreign currency, not plastic student IDs attached to W&M lanyards. He asked us if we were bused in for a program.