From College Monthly Magazine (May, 1974)
An illusory belief that is still quite popular, even in these days of widespread disillusionment, is that crime cannot occur within the realm of academia. The residents of academia themselves – students, faculty, administrators – are, ironically, the ones who seem to be the most impressed with this foolish notion. Crime belongs on the street, say they, not on the campus. “It can’t happen here.”
But can’t it? Check last year’s newspaper: students and faculty were reported murdered in New York, California, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Scores of coeds were either raped or sexually harassed. Numerous institutions experienced armed robberies. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property was stolen from student dormitories. And you can be sure that the newspaper illuminated but the tip of an iceberg.
“Violent crimes are continuing to increase at a rapid rate”
Recently I spoke with Mr. John W. Powell, Executive Secretary of the International Association of College and University Security Directors, in Hamden, Conn., for an informed perspective on the matter. Because no federal agency maintains separate statistics for the amount of crime that occurs on campus. Mr. Powell was at loss to give us an exact appraisal. He noted, however, that it was his distinct impression that crimes against collegiate property, which usually are not of a violent nature, had begun to “level off”, but that crimes against the person – violent crimes – are continuing to increase at a rapid rate.
Were campus security forces responding to the challenge? Powell thought so. “Slowly but surely, the field is heading towards professionalism,” he said. Nevertheless he admitted that many, if not most colleges and universities in the country were encountering serious obstacles in attempting to provide their campuses with increased security.
We became acquainted with the disconcerting nature of these obstacles when we investigated matters relating to crime and security at numerous representative campuses in the college-dotted state of Nw York. In general we found that at smaller, rural campuses the incidence of crime was so minimal that whatever degree of security was provided – even if by non-professionals – was adequate, at least for the time being. It was easier to perceive the obstacles to increased professionalized campus security once we began to visit the academies who really needed it: the medium to large size, urban and suburban universities.
Frankly, if every college and university in the United States had as much – I should say as little -crime as Keuka College, in Keuka, New York, there would be little reason for us to call the belief that “ it can’t happen here” illusory. From all appearances, it can’t happen – at least not here. “This is a safe place to go to school,” asserts Mr. Ralph Wilkes, president of this small, isolated, liberal arts college on the shore of beautiful Lake Keuka. The most serious crime to have been committed within Wilkes’ memory – and Wilkes has been president for over 23 years – was the theft of a color television set from the lounge of a women’s dormitory. Occasionally, we learned, one of the female students’ rowdy, overintoxicated, out-of-town boyfriends stirs up a fight at a Saturday night dance and has to be forcibly ejected from the campus, but, obviously, no active criminal element threatens the safety and security of this picture-book college community. When we began talking about a “wave of campus crime” no one at Keuka, including President Wilkes, knew what we were talking about.
“This campus is no longer a haven; roughly $83,000 worth of property was stolen”
Whatever minor security problems do arise here are taken care of by Keuka’s tiny, non-professional, police force. The force – if one chooses to call it that – consists of one or two unarmed and unassuming “security officers,” whom the college “rents” from a private, out-of-town, industrial security agency (in this case, William Burns); to be sure, many other small, passive colleges do the same. Every night, the Burns men, who rather resemble genial, old fashioned and harmless English constables, patrol and repatrol Keuka’s 173 acres and 20 major buildings: checking doors and windows, seeing girls to their dorms, etc. Apparently their most stimulating duty is the chaperonage of parties and dances. None of them has ever had to make an arrest. And none of these “officers,” who, incidentally, work for about $100 a week, imagines that they ever will.
A good deal more people seemed concerned about crime and security at Cornell University, in Ithaca. New York (population, 20,000+), whose sprawling, ivy-draped, 730 acre campus, often described as being the most beautiful in America, is located but a half an hour’s drive away. Fortunately, there have been no murders at Cornell – at least not on the college Grounds (a drug-related murder of a lagetown two years ago). But everything else seems to have happened – rapes, armed robberies, felonious assaults, you name it.
“This campus is no longer a heaven,” says Lowell T. George, director of the university’s Safety Division, with an unmistakable gravity in his voice. Only last year two Cornell co-eds were raped, and the number of cases of harassment – in which rape is often the actual motive – reached 27, more than double the number recorded the year before. Mr. Powell’s impressions notwithstanding, crimes against property did not appear to have “levelled out” – at least not here. If anything, they had increased. Roughly $83,000 worth of property was stolen, a record amount. And, to top everything off, Cornell provided the setting for one of the most spectacular campus heists on history, as two Cornell students on leave of absence broke into Barton Hall, the men’s gymnasium, and made off with the entire arsenal of the university’s Army ROTC unit, including: 48 M-14 rifles, 17.22 calibre rifles, five .45 calibre rifles, a grenade launcher, two telescopic rifle sights, seven compasses, a radio set, and 200 rounds of ammunition. The miscreants, who appear to have wanted to sell their loot (street value was estimated as at least $50,000) rather than employ it, were apprehended and arrested only after an intensive search of the Northeastern underground in which the Safety Division the United States Treasury Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and numerous state police departments all participated.
If Cornell provides a good example of a campus that has been hard hit by the operatives of crime, it provides an equally good example of a university that is fortunate to employ a relatively professional security system. Its forty-odd Safety Division patrolmen are, by and large, a breed apart from the celebrated “rent-a-cops” one is apt to see at one of the smaller colleges in the vicinity. Elderly men in search of companionship and a few extra bucks, Cornell’s protectors seem for the most part to be relatively young, college-educated men who seek the reward of a career. One would not think Cornell would be able to attract such men when it only offers patrolmen a starting salary of $7,650, but it does.
“We’d rather not have cops at all, particularly cops with guns. But who else is going to take care of this shit? The local police?”
Perhaps the best proof of the force’s professionalism is the fact that even though its men have been allowed to wear their hand guns at all times (when they’re on duty, that is) for quite a number of years, and even though they have had frequent occasion to draw their arms (as in apprehending an armed robber), they have never found it necessary to discharge them – at least not in the direction of a human being. To be sure, such reserve is not only an indication of their character, but of their rigorous training: in all, some 22 weeks of classroom and field instruction and experience are required of the Safety Division rookie before he is permitted to go out on patrol by himself: half of the training is supervised by members of outside law enforcement agencies, half by veterans of the division.
One might suspect that students and faculty at the schools which The Underground Guide to America […] the competence and professionalism of the Cornell University Safety Division.
“Look,” said one sophomore, who seemed to be expressing the campus consensus, “we’d rather not have cops at all, particularly cops with guns. But who else is going to take care of this shit? The local police? Ask anyone. They’re tearass. If they were in charge of enforcing the law on the Hill this college might get it together again, I mean politically.” A lieutenant on the Division proudly confirmed: “The students trust us. They realize that we understand their problems better than any outside force could. We get along very well.”
Seemingly but one major barrier remains before the men of the Safety Division can attain the high morale necessary for a truly steady level of professional self-respect: legal self-sufficiency. State law requires that campus security officers must report the occurrence of any serious crime or accident to the duty incorporated local police department; in this case, the Ithaca City Police. Many of the men resent having to do this, particularly in light of the fact that they consider themselves as well, if not better, trained to deal with crime than their colleagues downtown. “We think that we should have primary jurisdiction over crimes committed on the campus,” says Mr. George. “We can handle our problems by ourselves. But the law doesn’t really let us.” He recommends action by the state legislature to repeal the offending statute, and clarify the legal status of campus security. Until such action is taken, he affirms, many of the men of the Safety Division will, at least in their own minds, continue to hover in a sort of uneasy twilight zone, uncertain of their constitutional legitimacy and uncertain of their status within the professional police community.
As an institution of comparable wealth, size, and facility, one would think that the United States of New York at Stony Brook, on the plush North Shore of Long Island would suffer as heavily from the wave of campus crime as Cornell. It does. Nevertheless it is not nearly as well-equipped to deal with it, namely because its 35 security men are not armed. Because the men are unarmed, we were told by Ken Sjolin, assistant director in charge […].