On the motivation of campus police

03 Oct 2009

What makes someone want to become a campus police officer? I say this in all seriousness. Not at all to demean them. I’m really curious. Being a normal cop is definitely a drag sometimes you have to do stuff like traffic that I could imagine being pretty boring. But you also see a lot of things, I imagine you learn a lot about society, and you can genuinely help people. Not to glorify the dirty work, but I can empathize with that feeling of wanting to actually get out on the street and help someone who’d be getting hurt otherwise. To be honest, I sometimes think that if I have grand ideas about politics and helping people, I should work as a police officer first. Then I’d have a real understanding of how the problems I’m claiming to come up with solutions for actually look in real life.

The same motivations of wanting to help people could apply to someone wanting to become a campus police officer. You’d help people stay safe in a new place, living away from home from the first time, etc. But there’s another aspect to it that I started thinking about last night.

Last night, I went to a 1920s themed party at a dorm on campus. I had heard about it from a lot of cool people, and it was billed as having a live jazz band, lots of dancing, and I figured it would be a cool scene. I expected that there’d be some drinking, but from the way it was described, it sounded like it would be mostly a fun scene.

So I got dressed up, and headed over a bit after ten. It quickly became clear that the party was not at all what I had expected. It was extremely crowded, and if there was a live band, I didn’t see it (there was a drum set in one corner of one room, but no one was playing). There was of course an iPod sound system blaring some typicalish dance music. And the drinking scene was way beyond what I had been expecting. It was totally out of control. About three minutes after I got there, the campus cops showed up and everyone had to leave. It was a big disappointment given the fact that I was expecting some socializing (I didn’t really care if there was a bit of alcohol I wasn’t planning to drink either way), good dancing, and a laid back night. None of those things happened.

As I was leaving with the same friends I had come with, I was thinking about what the cops must think. It must feel so hopeless. So futile. I mean, maybe some of them had bad experiences with drinking, or knew someone who was badly hurt in a drinking-related incident, and decided to take it into their own hands. But it must be so hard to carry on, busting up one alcohol-soaked party after another. It must feel like there’s nothing you can do. No matter how many drunk kids you kick out, no matter how many times you make someone leave who potentially could have hurt themselves or gotten hurt later, there will always be another. I suppose there’s a satisfaction in knowing that you helped even one person, but it’s not like that’ll make it stop. For every person who is reformed like that and doesn’t do it again after such a close call, there are a hundred who just carry on.

It must take a lot of perseverance to keep going with that job, feeling as though you can never really have an effect. I have an enormous amount of respect for someone who makes that decision. I don’t know if I’d be able to. But I almost feel like I should, like if I’m not going to engage in the kind of behavior they’re up against every night, that I should be out there helping them. Maybe there’s no place for taking a back seat here. Maybe I need to get off my high horse of moral superiority and just try to help someone out.

I don’t know if that’s what the cops actually think about it. This is all purely speculation. But I do know that this is a societal problem. Can the cops fix it? I don’t know that either. But they’ve got an incredibly important job to do. No matter what the politicians are doing, no matter how society is changing or staying the same, they’re there to make sure it happen safely. To me, the institution of the police is one of the most important there is. It’s a government agency that exists for no reason other than us. No politics, no values, just priorities. Safety and respect. Those are elements of a civil society that don’t exist in a lot of places. During the Bush years, when our civil liberties were being assaulted left and right, and our country was making a mockery out of its core values domestically and internationally, I would hear people say that we were living in a dictatorship, that our government was no better than a military junta, and I would say, no, that’s not true. Because we could wake up in the morning and know that there wouldn’t be a mob running through the street. This country’s ability to maintain peace and domestic tranquility through changes of power and huge catastrophic events is incredibly important. It’s something that we should treasure, and not write off thoughtlessly. Without that support from the bottom up, none of the institutions we prize would function.

It’s not always perfect. There are corrupt or inefficient police forces all over the place. But in the big picture, they’re the exception, not the rule. I look at police as a body of people who, as a general rule, genuinely want to help people. And as such, I maintain a great deal of respect for them, and a great deal of sympathy for the things they deal with every day so that we don’t have to.

The question is, should we?