Campus Cops’ Contested Role

Tell Sgt. Dustin Young he’s not a real cop. He has broken up drunken brawls, pulled a four-foot snake out of a building, and investigated countless cases of sexual assault. A few years ago, he saw a young man walking toward tracks and an oncoming train. Sergeant Young raced up, grabbed the hood of his sweatshirt, and yanked him back just before the train roared by. It came so close that it cut the man’s ear and tore off his shoe.

For 14 years, Sergeant Young has been a policeman here on Miami University’s main campus of 20,000. He has saved lives and seen some lost. Once, outside a raging house fire off campus, the 6-foot-2, 250-pound officer held back students desperate to rush into the flames to rescue three friends, who never made it out.

“That was a rough night,” he says quietly, driving around the campus with the window down, listening for a scream, a crash, a siren that could signal trouble.

Sergeant Young is at Miami to protect students and employees from outsiders, from one another, from themselves. Yet even as shootings make campuses seem like dangerous places, people sometimes scoff at the officers who patrol them. Their own senior administrators may not respect them, asking them to take out the garbage or play chauffeur. Campus police forces have been around for decades, but they are still perceived as the feeble security guards they replaced. They are dogged by the notion that they are not real cops.

On a normal day, patrolling a campus might seem like a cushy gig. But it’s specialized, high-stakes work. In a small city or town, the police often serve a steady population with predictable routines. Campus police officers, meanwhile, must safeguard an environment dotted with expensive facilities, inhabited by youngsters who may think they’re invincible and who can be attractive targets for thieves, sex offenders, and worse. Most campus cops, particularly at public colleges, are sworn, having taken the same oath to defend the law as any other police officer. Most have arrest powers, guns, and jurisdiction beyond their campuses.

They are also caught up in some of the same crises of race, abuse, and use of force that have beset other police departments in recent years. Protesters pepper-sprayed at the University of California at Davis, a black professor tackled at Arizona State, a black student detained at gunpoint at Yale. In July the University of Cincinnati came under national scrutiny when a campus officer fatally shot a black motorist during a routine traffic stop.

Public reaction seems to depend on the offender. In the case of city cops, residents call for reform and better training. The Cincinnati case prompted people to once again challenge the authority of campus police forces everywhere.

“They’re not cops,” said Joseph T. (Joe) Deters, the prosecutor who charged Ray Tensing, the university officer, with murder. Colleges, Mr. Deters argued, should get out of the policing business.

The Cincinnati incident prompted people to ask what exactly campus cops are for. Do they protect the public or the exclusivity of the campus environment? As privately operated agencies, are they beholden to the whims of administrators?

In fact, campus police departments were created to handle a complicated setting that other law-enforcement agencies, lacking the resources or the right touch, could not. Today, tensions over policing nationally center on officers’ relationships with the people they serve. Campus forces may be mocked, but at their best, they serve as models for “community policing,” an approach that emphasizes interaction with the population and a de-escalation of conflict.

Most cops say they got into policing to help people. “But in a big city, they are report writers,” says Sergeant Young. That is, many turn up after a 911 call, make arrests, issue tickets, take notes, then rush off to the next call. They have little time to deal with problems proactively.

In between peeling a drunken 18-year-old off the sidewalk and reprimanding a group of young men tearing banners off buildings, Sergeant Young talks about his role as a teacher.

He tries to help students see how their actions could hurt themselves or others, or how the police elsewhere might react. “Our stance is not to arrest first,” he says. “Most of the officers who work here want to educate.”

Colleges got into policing mainly because other approaches weren’t working. For many years, at most colleges, students were monitored by administrators and professors who lived on or around campus. (Yale, which established the first campus police force, in 1896, was an exception.) Over time, rudimentary campus-security units evolved within physical-plant departments.

But the burgeoning growth of colleges in the mid-20th century put a strain on security, as did the political and social movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Campuses became hot spots for antiauthoritarian voices, antiwar protests, experimental drug use, and counterculture. When demonstrators occupied buildings or became violent, administrators and local officials often called in city or county law enforcement. Infamously, in 1970, the governor of Ohio sent the National Guard to control an antiwar protest at Kent State University; the guardsmen fired into the crowd, killing four students and wounding nine others.

That heavy-handedness seemed at odds with academe’s ideals of free speech and inquiry. Max L. Bromley, an emeritus associate professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, remembers attending a demonstration at Florida State University in the early ’70s: “The local sheriff’s department came with bayonets attached to their rifles.”

University officials wanted police forces that fit their ethos. “You want to have control over the people who are responsible for the protection of the community,” says Gary J. Margolis, a former chief of police at the University of Vermont who is now a security consultant to colleges. “A university police department has to maintain a level of understanding of the growth and development of young adults.”

States grant colleges the authority to establish police forces through “enabling legislation,” Mr. Margolis explains. The University of California established its force in 1947, Wayne State University’s started in 1966, Georgia Regents University’s in 1973, Utah State’s in 1981. The State of Vermont granted the authority just to the University of Vermont, in 1991; other institutions in the state have only security departments, which lack arrest powers and may be unarmed.

Since the protest years, campuses have become even more complicated. Big universities can have teaching hospitals, charter schools, day-care centers, vast athletics facilities, transit centers, banks, and science labs with dangerous chemicals or radioactive materials. What’s more, student deaths and ensuing lawsuits have pushed the campus police to professionalize.

The murder of Jeanne Clery at Lehigh University in 1986 cast a harsh light on campus safety and raised expectations for law enforcement. The Clery Act, a federal law passed in 1990, requires colleges that receive federal money to keep a record of and issue warnings about crimes on campus. Layers of amendments — about emergency preparedness and dating violence, for example — have prompted colleges to ramp up security. Since 1995, the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators has set standards for the field.

September 11, 2001 heightened anxieties about campus security, and in 2007, the mass shooting at Virginia Tech led to greater attention, regulation, and scrutiny of new safety measures. Sadly, shootings from Northern Illinois University to the University of Alabama at Huntsville to Umpqua Community College have kept campuses on guard.

Despite the trend, some institutions never established their own police forces. The University of Idaho, lacking the authority to hire its own, gets three city officers full time. In the early 2000s, to save money, Auburn University disbanded its campus police force to rely on the local city police. (Last year the parents of Lauren Burk, a student who was kidnapped from the campus and murdered in 2008, filed a claim against Auburn for $1 million, on the grounds that their daughter would be alive if the university had its own police. A state board rejected the claim.)

Today, 92 percent of public colleges and 38 percent of private institutions — mainly larger ones — have sworn officers, according to a survey of campuses with 2,500 or more students by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Nearly 95 percent of campus officers carry guns, a fact that has sparked debate in some places. Over all, colleges employ nearly 15,000 sworn officers and another 17,000 support personnel.

Contrary to the stereotypes of second-rate officers, those on many campuses are trained at least as much as, if not more than, typical urban police, says Mr. Bromley. Campus agencies are more diverse — with 31 percent minority officers, compared with 27 percent in city departments — and are more likely to require a college degree and psychological screening. On average, campus forces require more hours of training, says Mr. Bromley, who is completing a comparative study.

That preparation is on display during a live-shooter exercise one recent morning at Towson University, a campus of 22,500 just north of Baltimore. Campus and Baltimore County cops, who often work together, walk through a building, covering one another as they clear restrooms and offices, pursuing an imaginary gunman. Towson’s Capt. Robert Novak, who is supervising the drill, has 31 years’ experience in the Baltimore City Police Department. He points to other officers: a couple other veterans of the city agency, a former lieutenant in the county sheriff’s department, and a recruit straight from the police academy. In a force of 40, some have backgrounds in cybercrime, child abuse, and narcotics.

Bernard J. Gerst, Towson’s police chief, spent 22 years in the Baltimore County Police Department before coming to the campus to run his own force. “A lot of the things you do in municipal policing you do on campus: community relations, crime prevention, high-visibility patrols, good, solid investigations,” says Chief Gerst. “I believe there is a higher expectation for campus police. Parents want their sons and daughters going to a safe institution, and there is a perception that crime doesn’t occur on campus, that it’s an oasis.”

You can’t compare municipal agencies with campus police departments, he says, to call one better than the other. About half of municipal police agencies nationally employ fewer than 10 officers, while some campus departments, like this one, are big and well-funded.

In Towson’s new $8-million public-safety building, a roomful of screens stream video from dozens of surveillance cameras. The facility also features an intake area with state-of-the-art equipment to fingerprint, interview, and hold suspects; an armory for work on firearms; and a nerve center outfitted with the latest communications technology for use in an emergency.

“Doesn’t look like a fly-by-night, rinky-dink organization, does it?” Chief Gerst says.

As campus police forces have grown, they have encountered some of the same problems that now dominate conversations about city police forces.

The pepper-spray incident at UC-Davis is one of the more indelible examples of abuse: In 2011, while students sat on the ground protesting income inequality and tuition hikes, a lieutenant walked along a line of them, coating them in an orange fog. The campus police chief resigned, and the lieutenant was fired; a report deemed the department “very dysfunctional.”

In 2006 an Iranian-American student at the University of California at Los Angeles alleged racial profiling after being stunned with a Taser when he refused to provide identification to campus police. A year later, a student heckling Sen. John Kerry at a forum at the University of Florida yelled, “Don’t tase me, bro!” before campus cops did just that. A video of the incident went viral.

Critics see an inherent problem in campus policing: answering to administrators with no training in law enforcement. Colleges are the only American institutions that can create a private police force, and under campus control, these cops prop up a system of justice that is not accountable to elected officials and “leads to highly disparate and sometimes discriminatory treatment of individuals,” wrote two criminologists, John Paul Wright, a professor at the University of Cincinnati, and Kevin M. Beaver, a professor at Florida State University, in an essay in The Chronicle last year. Colleges should do away with their police departments, they argued, and transfer their officers to local agencies.

In recent years, the University of Cincinnati was doing anything but pulling back. In fact, its force took a far more active role than the city police in patrolling neighborhoods around the campus. There was nearly a robbery a day, with a big spike in 2008, which threatened the reputation of a university striving for greater prestige. Students carrying phones, tablets, and laptops were attractive targets. While working with developers to refurbish parts of town, the university hired dozens more officers to bolster its patrols. In sentencing hearings for crimes against students, the university’s president and the city’s police chief urged a judge to “send a clear, forceful, and reverberating message to criminals.” Over time, the number of robberies and other offenses fell by half.

But, local activists ask, at what price? Like many college forces, Cincinnati’s police department operates under a memorandum of understanding with the city force, giving university officers jurisdiction off the campus. In Cincinnati, abuse by the police in the late 1990s and early 2000s led to broad reforms and data collection about police officers’ performance, routinely reviewed for racial profiling and other biases. But university cops could make misdemeanor traffic stops without reporting information about them to the city — a “giant loophole,” says Al Gerhardstein, a prominent civil-rights lawyer in Cincinnati.

Such figures might have flagged Officer Ray Tensing. In July, Mr. Tensing stopped Samuel DuBose a half-mile off the campus for driving without a front license plate. The officer, who is white, then fatally shot Mr. DuBose, who was black, in the head as he started to pull away. Reports released later by the university showed that Mr. Tensing had a tendency to stop and ticket black drivers.

In the past five years, Mr. Gerhardstein has sued the university police twice for abuse of African-Americans, including in 2011, when an officer shot a black student with a stun gun, which caused a heart attack and the student’s death. Much of the trouble, says the lawyer, has come from the university’s using its police force to build an invisible wall around the campus.

“We can look at the statistics,” he says, “and see that their traffic enforcement was totally geared toward pushing black people away from the campus.”

Jason Goodrich, the university’s police chief for the past year, says he was never under any direction to build a “force field” around the campus. He was “horrified,” he says, by the data showing racial bias.

Robin S. Engel, a professor of criminal justice and director of the Institute of Crime Science, who helped devise the university’s crime-reduction strategy, says there has been no explicit policy to single out local residents. In fact, she argues, the university police have been a benefit to the locals: Crimes against them, she points out, have dropped more than those against students.

After Mr. DuBose’s death and Mr. Tensing’s indictment, the university announced that it would temporarily pull its patrols back behind the campus boundaries. “My email started blowing up,” Ms. Engel says, “with people who were concerned because they wanted these patrols out there.”

The role of the campus police is widely debated, she says. “We need to be very, very careful about those policing strategies … to make sure that they are perceived as equitable and legitimate.”

That’s her new job, overseeing the reform of the police at the University of Cincinnati. She will soon hire an outside company to perform a top-to-bottom review of the university’s department.

For some college police forces, off-campus activity is a distraction from their main mission. Ten minutes from the University of Cincinnati, officers at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, except in extraordinary circumstances, don’t leave the campus. They direct traffic and deal with occasional scuffles and sometimes violent crime. Last year a student bludgeoned a delivery man with a rock in a campus rest room, robbed him, and later tried to have him killed so he couldn’t testify.

Patrolling the surrounding neighborhoods isn’t the officers’ job, says O’dell M. Owens, Cincinnati State’s president. “How are you making my campus safe when you’re half a mile away?” says Dr. Owens about the police department at the University of Cincinnati, where he is a former member of the Board of Trustees. “Their guys were driving around, writing a hell of a lot of tickets. That’s not your role as campus police.”

The alleged murder of Mr. DuBose prompted Dr. Owens and his police chief to review their policies: Do officers focus on helping students? Do they get training in anger management? Does the department screen for bad apples in its hires? To all, yes. One question for applicants is what they would do if they found a student sleeping in a building on a cold night. If the answer is kick the student out, the candidate isn’t hired. Some students are homeless, and the right kind of officer would help them find shelter.

That orientation can run counter to common tactics in city police departments. Last year two city cops filed a complaint against an officer at California State University-Monterey Bay after he refused to use a stun gun on an emotionally distraught student. According to reports, the campus officer had calmed the student, who was black. The officer went to get the student a cup of water, leaving him with the city officers, who had been called in as backup. They physically restrained the student, who resisted. When the campus officer returned, the others ordered him to use his stun gun.

The university officer was fired for a “failure to act.” But after support from the police union, students, and the distraught student’s father, the officer got his job back, albeit with a demotion, a few months later.

Cpl. Jeffrey H. Solomon, president of the Cal State system’s police union, says campus cops, unlike many city officers, have the time to interact with students, to get to know them. Corporal Solomon, who mainly patrols residence halls on the Sacramento campus, sees himself as a kind of parent, helping students work through depression, relationship issues, and other stresses.

A few years ago, he shot and wounded a student who had stabbed his roommate to death. He must be prepared for such incidents, but they are rare. “I like the fact that I don’t have to be a gunslinger every day,” he says, “and that most of our work is good, positive work.”

But the relationship between campus cops and the population they serve isn’t perfect. Students can be skeptical, even cynical. At Miami of Ohio, Sergeant Young has had beer bottles hurled at him. When he encounters drunken students and tries to talk to them about alcohol abuse, some later file complaints, saying he was rude.

“They want to tell you how to do your job,” he says, “or Mom and Dad are lawyers, and they want to call Mom and Dad so they can tell you how to do your job.”

The job, as Sergeant Young sees it, is somewhere between enforcer and psychologist.

While driving around the thumping bars of this college town, Sergeant Young sees a young, blonde woman, arms draped over her friends’ shoulders, who appears too drunk to walk. He gets out of his car, goes over, and asks for her I.D. She starts crying, worried that a mark on her record will jeopardize her college career and her dream of working with foster children. “I can’t get in trouble,” she says. “Please.”

After a Breathalyzer test, the officer discovers she’s not that drunk, and he soon gets the real story. It’s her last semester at Miami, and she’s worried she’ll leave college without a boyfriend. Being carried along was a little drama to attract attention; Sergeant Young notices a suitor hovering nearby. “I am just looking to find the guy I’m going to marry someday,” the student says.

“Can I tell you a secret?” the officer replies. “It’s never good to find a guy when you’re drunk.” He, the student, and her friends share a laugh. He gives her the straw from the Breathalyzer. “That’s your souvenir,” he says, a reminder of tonight’s lesson.

As she walks off into the night, she tosses the straw to the ground. Sergeant Young sighs. He could ticket her for littering. But he gets back in his car to drive to a dormitory on the edge of campus. Someone there has found a young man, covered in vomit, on the floor of a bathroom stall.

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.