Campus PD: Criminalizing Higher Education?

CampusPD : Criminalizing Higher Education?byDavid J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
In what wasobviously a slow night television night, I found myself searching for somethingto watch.  After perusing up anddown the onscreen schedule, I came across CampusPD (I was somewhat familiar with show having read about their filming inPullman, WA, where I live), a show that "takes viewers along for the ride withofficers on duty to capture firsthand all the mayhem and excitement they takeon night after night when student fun spirals out of control." The show isdescribed in the following way:
From policing parties and securityissues, to keeping the peace at sports events and arresting possible suspects,ride with the "Campus PD"as they tackle the ongoing challenge of keeping students safe. Depictinguniversity life from the perspective of the law enforcement professionals whopolice them, this ground-breaking new series presents a real-life account ofthese modern-day campus heroes. As they gear up for a shift, these courageouscops know they're in for a few surprises!
The series heads to five college townsacross the country including Tallahassee, FL, San Marcos, TX, Cincinnati, OH,Chico, CA, and Greenville, NC. It takes viewers deep inside the internal livesof the law enforcement professionals policing a town of fun-loving collegekids. It isn't easy, but these dedicated officers love their jobs, and wouldn'thave it any other way.
The emphasis on"fun," "keeping student's safe" "fun-loving college kids," parties, and "bingedrinking COEDS" is instructive, demonstrating how a show about criminalmisconduct goes to great extents to decriminalize its primarily white,middle-class, "participants" and in doing so criminalizes the Other once again.
The show mightas well be called "Warning PD."  Inthe three episodes I watched on television, and countless clips online (whichdon't necessarily show the encounters from start to finish leaving it hard tosee the final resolution), I have only seen a handful of actual arrests.  For the most part, the show brings tolife several excessively permissive campus police forces, who tolerate abuse,disrespect, and a culture of chaos. In many instances, college students are given countless warnings, andonly after failing to comply with instructions, are they forced to deal withthe repercussions of their actions with a ticket or an arrest.  
Another commontheme within these initial episodes I watched from start to finish was a belieffrom the students they were unjustly being persecuted by the police.  Students would often note that, "theywere not doing" anything wrong, or that they were simply engaged in "harmlessfun" only to be harassed by campus police.  Given the ways in which harassment, racial profiling, andpre-text stops so often define the experiences of youth of color, it is a troublingre-imagination of policing in America. Worse yet, Campus PD does agood job in showing why many college students view police as unfairly harassingthem. 
In two differentepisodes (as in the book Dorm RoomDealers), students respond to the presence of police by telling them to go"police" and investigate some real criminals.  That is, they were wasting their time with the happenings ofcollege students since they were harmless, as opposed to those who "lived overthere."  In both instances, "overthere" was clearly the neighborhood inhabited by poor people of color.  This assumption (one that is reinforcedby the show) that the "real criminals" exist elsewhere reflects the power of Americanracial and class logic. 
According to astudy from the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education, 95 percent ofrespondents imagined an African American when asked about drug users.  In other words, blackness operatesinterchangeably with criminality, especially in relationship to the urbanpoor.  Better said, "to be a man ofcolor of a certain economic class and milieu is equivalent in the public eye tobeing a criminal." (John Edgar Wideman, p. 195)
The consequencesof the permissive policing and a culture that imagines college students engagedin criminal activity as just having fun (as opposed to the "real criminals"),is evident in the lack of attention directed at the criminal misconduct takingplace at America's colleges and universities.
According to a 2007study reported in USA Today, overhalf of America's college student regularly abuse alcohol and drugs. 
The study found that college studentshave higher rates of alcohol or drug addiction than the general public: 22.9%of students meet the medical definition for alcohol or drug abuse or dependence— a compulsive use of a substance despite negative consequences — compared with8.5% of all people 12 and older.
Increasingly,along with the traditionally seen drug and alcohol abuse, college students areabusing prescription drugs like Adderall, termed "smart drugs" by many collegestudents.  "For many middle andupper-middle class young people in New York," notesLala Straussner. "Adderall is much more acceptable than usingmethamphetamine (more common on West Coast) or crack cocaine, although thebrain doesn't know the difference." Yet, the ubiquity and acceptance of "smartdrugs" is simply the perceived function or the consequences of these drugs butthe ways in which crack and meth are both racialized and connected to distinctclass identities.  Prescriptiondrugs, on the other hand, are linked to those in college, who are said to havea future, illustrating criminality and criminals are identities are constructedas elsewhere and not within college communities.   
While shows likeCampus PD illustrate the ubiquity ofinstances of public intoxication, cases of drunk-driving, and physical assaults,other issues plague college communities. As such, it does little to elucidate the problem of sexual violence (20-25%of women in college will experience rape or an attempted rape), prescriptiondrug abuse, and even drug dealing. The erasure of these systemic problems reflects a culture that imaginescollege as a space of parties, fun, and adolescent behavior rather thancriminal activity. 
This type ofnarrative is evident in the recent drug busts at San Diego Sate University andColumbia University.  In 2008,after a several month investigation, authorities arrested 75 students (96people in total), confiscating drugs worth a total of approximately $100,000worth of drugs.  Among the 20students arrested for distribution and sales was a criminal justice major, whowhen arrested was in possession of two guns and500 grams of cocaine.   San DiegoCounty Dist. Atty. Bonnie Dumanis made clear that their investigationdemonstrated "how accessible and pervasive illegal drugs continue to be on ourcollege campuses and how common it is for students to be selling to otherstudents." This was certainly true with Columbia University, where 5 studentswere arrested as part of "Operation Ivy League," "afive-month undercover sting, during which police purchased $11,000 worth ofdrugs from the students out of Columbia fraternity houses and dorms." 
While the mediarendered this incidence and that at SDSU as a shocking spectacle, it is clearthat the situation at these schools is a national phenomenon.   This should actually be surprisinggiven how drug markets are as segregated as the rest of America.  According to A. Rafik Mohamed and ErikD. Fritsvold, authors of Dorm Room Dealers , who spent 6-yearsexamining drug distribution at a Southern California Private school, not onlydo students sell to other students, but do in a reckless manner, which in theirmind highlight a sense of entitlement based on the students' middle-class whiteidentities.  Phillip Smithdescribes their findings in "DormRoom Dealers: A Peek into the Drug World of the White and Upwardly Mobile":
Mohamed and Fritsvold show repeatedly thereckless abandon with which their subjects went about their business: Dopedeals over the phone with uncoded messages, driving around high with pounds ofpot in the car, doing drug transactions visible from the street, selling tostrangers, smuggling hundreds of pills across the Mexican border. These campusdealers lacked even the basics of drug dealer security measures, yet they flewunder the radar of the drug warriors.
Even when the rare encounter with policeoccurred, these well-connected students skated. In one instance, a dealer gottoo wasted and attacked someone's car. He persuaded a police officer to takehim home in handcuffs to get cash to pay for the damages. The cop ignored thescales, the pot, the evidence of drug dealing, and happily took a hundreddollar bill for his efforts. In another instance, a beach front dealer was thevictim of an armed robbery. He had no qualms about calling the police, who onceagain couldn't see the evidence of dealing staring them in the face and whomanaged to catch the robbers. The dealer wisely didn't claim the pounds of potpolice recovered and didn't face any consequences.
Aformer Columbia student highlights a similar culture there, adding moreevidence to the arguments offered in DormRoom Dealers.
But,in fact, the prestigious institution on Manhattan's Upper West Side has long been"ripe" for drug trafficking, a knowledgeable 2009 Columbia graduate told TheDaily Beast. "I think the permissive environment of Public Safety"—asColumbia's campus police force is known—"makes it a no-brainer proposition,"said this former student, who described himself as a recreational drug user whodabbled in selling. "I always felt safe."
The culture andclimate of Columbia in terms of public concern and policing, as opposed to thelevels of surveillance found a few miles away in Harlem, tells an importantstory about how race and class operate in contemporary America.  CampusPD offers a similarly distorted glimpse a crime as well.
Media accountsof these two recent drug operations and shows like Campus PD have done little to shine a spotlight on the doublestandards that exist between the primarily white middle-class studentpopulation and poor youth of color when it comes to policing andincarceration.  Withthe situation at Columbia, one student has plead guilty thus far; althoughcharged with the most serious crimes, he was sentenced to 6-months in prison inJuly.  In a city where 46,500people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2009, with 87% of these peoplebeing black and Latino, the inequality is quite clear.
San Diego saw asimilar outcome, with many of those arrested pleading guilty only to faceprobation and entrance into a drug diversion programs, leading some people toquestion why police are spending so much time and energy conductinginvestigations against college students that do not result in incarcerations.   When considering the media coverage, popular representationsof college campuses, levels of policing and unzealous prosecution, it is nowonder that while African Americans constitute 13% of all monthly drug users,they represent 38% of these arrested for drug possession, 55% of convictionsand 74% of prison sentences; it is as argued by Michelle Alexander, the new JimCrow, ostensibly cordoning off America's college and universities from policingand prosecution.  Thecriminalization of black and brown youth and the decriminalization of whiteAmerica, particularly its middle-class college-bound constituency, havematerial consequences.  
Evident in ashow like Campus PD and the variousexamples provided here is the ways in which  "what it means to be criminal in our collectiveconsciousness to what it means to be black."  In other words, "the term black criminal is nearly redundant. . . . To be a black man is to be thought of as a criminal, and to be a blackcriminal is to be despicable – a social pariah" (Alexander2010, p. 193).   No wonderso many students yell at cops to go focus on the "real criminals"; that is themessage they have learned all too well.
***
David J. Leonardis Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and RaceStudies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, videogames, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academicmediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examiningthe interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representationsthrough contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary AfricanAmerican Cinema and the forthcoming AfterArtest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regularcontributor to NewBlackMan andblogs @ No Tsuris.