Law enforcement needs to prioritize for student safety

For reasons that are unclear to me, last semester I began seeing excessive numbers of law enforcement officers in the Georgetown area. Their teeming presence did not by itself bother me.  Whatever the reason, I still felt a sense of security knowing there were always  police nearby if needed. But at the same time, I noticed an increase in Department of Public Safety-issued write-ups for rambunctious parties and Phishy aromas, and it seriously irked me.
Admittedly, it’s asinine to complain about law enforcement officers enforcing laws. What really killed me was that while the number of stash boxes increased, DPS emails about stolen laptops increased. Between September and November 2009, DPS reported 10 incidents of drug possession. In Septmber 2010, alone, 10 were reported, with another 14 in October and November.

The problem of too much crime and too little time, money, or human resources to do enough about it is basic economics for law enforcement officials. An increased number of crimes stopped and criminals processed is not enough, because some crimes are more serious than others. Personally, I prioritize finding the Riddler’s ever-growing cache of laptops higher than exhaustively searching a dorm room for a few grams of wacky tobacky, even if someone did draw too much attention to themselves by poorly ventilating their room while playing loud Bob Marley. I would like to make constructive suggestions as to how DPS could better allocate and prioritize its resources, but it really is not Georgetown’s most transparent department.
This semester hasn’t seemed as tense between students and DPS. But now, between the Advisory Neighborhood Council and Metropolitan Police Department, students have bigger problems to worry about. In January, “late night” shouting became unlawful and could warrant arrests, with a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail and a $500 fine. More recently, local bars received reminders regarding D.C. policies on serving underage persons, and several were raided. Friends and acquaintances of mine have been arrested at liquor stores recently, too.

Yet violent crimes and property crimes occur at much higher rates in D.C. than they do nationally. In light of this DPS and MPD’s choice to pursue underage drinkers so aggressively makes little sense. It calls into question whether the drinking age is an inherently ineffective law, and if its enforcement is counterproductive. In most cases an underage drinker with a fake ID has the opportunity to pay too much to drink in a public place, one where they must legally be refused service once they are too hammered to tell their fake IDs from their debit cards. That’s it. On-campus binge drinking is essentially unaffected—and only more likely to occur when the drinking age is strongly enforced.

That’s really all that increased enforcement accomplishes. The recent citations and arrests may seem intimidating, but they really change very little about campus drinking culture. Underage drinkers can still simply ask legal drinkers to buy alcohol for them. “Procuring alcohol for an underage person” is certainly a discouraging charge for a Hoya to face, but legal drinkers potentially face the same charge every time they host a party with underage guests—the point being that Georgetown students will always be willing to risk these charges.
In the coming weekends, if the cops were to bust a party and actually charge some poor 21-year-old for procurement, I wouldn’t be surprised. But aside from garnering some money from citations, they would accomplish nothing. There is no real benefit when a handful of officers spend several hours of their shift documenting and processing the fact that college students were drinking with friends. And there is no clear point when increased enforcement can declared a success or a failure.

A high volume of reported crimes doesn’t imply effective or efficient enforcement. It is the prioritization of crimes that is critical. If I’m expected to believe that corralling students is currently among D.C’s main police concerns and that resources aren’t being misappropriated, I expect that D.C.’s other crime rates are well below the national averages. But as I discussed, the reality is that in 2009,  the most recent year for which statistics are available, D.C.’s violent crime rate was three times the national average, and its property crime rate is one-and-a-half times the national average. Students are easy targets, but aside from keeping police preoccupied, there is no point in seeing them as targets at all.