Police response is unsatisfactory

At around 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 11, following the armed robbery that occurred in the early hours of that same day in the Edens Quadrangle fire lane, an incident occurred with a Duke University police officer that has prompted this letter.

Six female students, all residents of Edens Quadrangle, were discussing campus safety with a uniformed police officer on patrol in Edens at the time. Students inquired as to what safety precautions they should take to protect themselves, in light of the armed robbery as well as the alleged rape which occurred in March in the wooded area surrounding Edens. The students indicated that they felt there should be greater surveillance of the area in response to those incidents.

The officer responded that female students’ best option would be to simply not go out late at night, and that those who did so, particularly while drinking, were “putting themselves in a position of danger” much like the student who was allegedly accosted and raped last year “at two in the morning.” Furthermore, the officer stated that if students weren’t always “actin’ a fool”—regarding drinking and partying on campus—more DUPD officers would have time to patrol the area.

This kind of response from a uniformed officer of the DUPD is completely and utterly inappropriate. It is an egregious overstatement to associate “walking late at night after drinking” to causing a rape like one which allegedly occurred last semester, in part because that incident, according to DUPD records, reportedly occurred at 10:15 p.m. (by general standards not especially late at night) and did not involve any alcohol. Furthermore, to claim that student actions of drinking, partying and walking after dark provoke rape, robbery or other crime is inappropriate and wrong.

The officer did say that he wished there were more officers than the DUPD budget allowed in order to increase campus safety, an issue that in part is being alleviated by the administration’s hiring of outside security guards to patrol all of West Campus. However, a shortage of officers and security guards is not where the heart of the problem lies.

While there is no doubt that students must take an active role in making good decisions regarding drinking and safety, no amount of good decision making will have an impact if paired with a police department whose officers think that certain students, by drinking, partying or even by simply walking home at 10:15 on a Friday night, are somehow deserving of a crime committed against them—and act according to that false notion. An officer whose job is to protect Duke and its community members carries with him this mindset—and it should be made clear to this officer and the department as a whole that no students, no matter what actions they participate in, deserve to have the entitlement of safety and security on campus taken away from them.

Professor Betsy Alden

Lissett Babaian

Trinity ’07

and 12 others