Department of Public Safety, why do I feel so unsafe?

“I’m off duty in 15 minutes. You can fuck up your lives all you want after that.”
That is not exactly what you would expect to hear from a Department of Public Safety officer on a Saturday night—yet I have.
Underage partying and subsequent DPS party-busting are regular weekend activities at Georgetown.The University has a well-publicized alcohol policy, and most underage students know the punishments they face by violating it. But less well-known is the protocol DPS officers use for busting parties. As a result, DPS’s enforcement of school policy is sometimes unnecessarily heavy-handed.
On a number of occasions when DPS busted a party I was attending, they have made me feel intimidated, threatened, and even unsafe. I do not know if this is typical of the dynamic between Georgetown students and DPS officers in this situation. The department did not respond to requests for comment about the number of students who file complaints about DPS’s behavior each semester. But I know that there are certainly times when DPS officers abuse the power they have and create a tense atmosphere where safety is compromised.
Part of the problem is that few students know whether they have the right to deny officers entry to their residence. In fact, they do not know what rights—if any—they have. Often students who in good faith attempt to invoke a right that they unknowingly surrendered to the University are slapped with a failure to comply charge in addition to whatever other violations they are cited for.
Students who are just there for the party often do not know if they have the right to leave, refuse a search, choose not to answer the door for an officer, or refuse to pour out alcohol. If there was a clear and established protocol that required the host of the party to answer the door, said that students must remain in the house until they are asked to leave, and made public what rights students still have while on campus, DPS officers might find students more compliant and students would feel safer in their presence.
But regardless of unclear protocol, it is obvious that the dialogue between officers and students needs to change. I have seen students reduced to tears by officers who isolate them from the rest of the crowd to shout at them. I have heard officers threaten to arrest students for not producing their GoCards.
One student, who wished to remain anonymous, recalled “[standing] in a line with five other friends in 15-degree weather for twenty minutes while six DPS officers arrived on the scene, one by one.”
When the student asked to be searched or charged, an officer responded, “Nuh-uh. This is Georgetown, not D.C. In here we can do what we want.”
After all this, the student and friends had to submit individual reports and were never contacted about the incident again.
Another student, who also wished to remain anonymous, witnessed a DPS officer walk into a party and say, “You guys have no idea how fucking fucked you are,” repeatedly. The director of Student Conduct ended up dropping all charges against them as a result of the officer’s threats.
DPS is designed to keep students safe, not to seek out groups of friends letting loose on a Saturday night as if they were dangerous criminals. This is not to say that students should not be punished for underage drinking, but there is a way to deal with underage drinking and treat students with respect at the same time. Conducting a party bust as if it were a drug raid, reducing students to tears, gratuitously threatening to arrest them, and making them feel unsafe is not the way DPS should operate.
The same student who was forced to stand outside in the cold said of his encounter with DPS, “This event and others have demonstrated to me that DPS is not interested in maintaining even a basic degree of civility. … It’s shocking that the University allows … such harassment, but then goes on worrying about creating a ‘community’ atmosphere.”
In the past we have seen Georgetown’s institutional failures come back to bite them in a number of incidents: Snowpocalypse, the noose scandal, and the confusion and misinformation in the wake of the DMT bust. Let’s avoid another. This is a problem Georgetown can easily solve by establishing a standard protocol for officers responding to unregistered parties and by encouraging officers to treat students with the respect they deserve.