The first documented presence of law enforcement personnel on college and university campuses occurred when Yale University hired two city of New Haven police officers to walk foot patrol on its campus in 1894 (Bordner and Peterson 1984; Powell 1994; Sloan 1992). As we enter the twenty-first century, campus police agencies now form the core of specialized protection and law enforcement at postsecondary institutions in the United States and Western Europe. This evolution has seen the campus police shift from providing little more than a campus watch function to one in which highly trained and specialized professional law enforcement officers engage in law enforcement, crime prevention, and service-related functions. This century of evolution also saw the number of agencies grow to nearly one thousand as of 2002 (http://dpsw.usc.edu/UnivPDWeb.html).
Campus police agencies developed as a direct outcome of returning World War II veterans and the arrival of the baby boomers at college during the 1960s. Additionally, although sharing many of the organizational and operational characteristics of local police agencies, they also face some unique challenges. Finally, with expansion and increased specialization of their role on campus, the future of campus police agencies involves further adaptation to changing needs and circumstances.
The Development of Modern Campus Police Agencies
The development of campus police agencies during the twentieth century involved an evolution in the role the agency played on the campus. The first decades of the century saw no university-based formal police entity on college or university campuses. Rather, the campus ”watchman” or guard became a familiar presence at many postsecondary institutions. These individuals were part of the campus maintenance department, were typically retired, worked only at night or on weekends, had no law enforcement training, and expected only to secure campus buildings.
During the 1930s and 1940s, campus ”watchmen” began enforcing college and university rules and monitoring violations of codes of conduct. Again, however, these individuals had no formal law enforcement training and were little more than security guards. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, an influx of WWII veterans flooded the college campus, forcing campus administrators to recognize a need for a more formal presence of security officials on campus. During this period formal ”campus security departments” or ”campus police departments” began appearing on college campuses. Separated from campus maintenance, these units were typically headed by administrators who were either ex-police officers or whom universities had hired away from local police departments. These individuals then turned to an organizational model with which they were most familiar—municipal police agen-cies—to structure the operational and tactical aspects of the department. Although more formalized in appearance, the individuals who worked for these departments did not differ greatly from their predecessors—poorly trained and educated, often retired, and generally not in a position to engage in true law enforcement functions.
With the coming of the baby boom generation to college during the 1960s and 1970s, colleges and universities faced a variety of pressures, including tremendous increases in the sheer numbers of students attending school; active political environments on campus that included protests; wide acceptance of drug use; and a much freer lifestyle among students. Because of these factors, college and university presidents were under increasing pressure to ensure order and prevent harm to property. They responded by allocating unprecedented resources to the campus police, including funding to hire additional officers, as well as approving enhancements to officers’ responsibilities. Concurrently, colleges petitioned the states to grant full police powers to campus officers and when the states agreed, it paved the way for the emergence of a true campus police entity on campuses.
During the 1980s, campus police agencies sought further ”professionalization” of officers. This was achieved by upgrading prospective officers’ qualifications and training requirements, developing specialized units within departments (for example, SWAT teams, detectives), and increasingly adopting not only the tactical, but the operational characteristics of municipal police departments. Officers relied heavily on automobiles to patrol campus, response time was emphasized, and crime control and order maintenance were stressed as key functions of the department. Some campus law enforcement agencies pursued—and were granted— national accreditation, further enhancing their stature.
By the 1990s, according to Jackson (1992), Lanier (1995), and Sloan, Lanier, and Beer (2000), campus law enforcement agencies, like their municipal counterparts, began to experiment with community-oriented policing (COP) or problem-oriented policing (POP) as new ”organizational models.”
Thus, the twentieth-century saw formal law enforcement on college campuses evolve from ”officers” performing little more than a campus watch function to officers receiving training comparable to that received by municipal police officers. Further, the evolution saw campus police move from being housed in the campus maintenance division to being housed in a separate unit within the larger organization, headed by a ”chief” or a ”director.” Finally, as local police agencies began exploring new organizational models, campus police agencies began looking to models such as COP and POP to determine their applicability on the college campus.
Organizational Characteristics and Functions of Campus Police Agencies
The single most important source of data on campus law enforcement is the Justice Department’s Campus Law Enforcement and Administrative Statistics (CLEMAS). In 1995, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) surveyed more than six hundred police agencies located at a random sample of four-year institutions of higher education in the United States with twenty-five hundred or more students to determine the nature of law enforcement services at these campuses (Reaves and Goldberg 1996; http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/clea95.pdf). The survey described the agencies in terms of their personnel, expenditures and pay, operations, equipment, computers and information systems, policies, and special programs.
Several studies using these data (for example, Bromley and Reaves 1998a, 1998b; Paoline and Sloan 2003; Reaves and Goldberg 1996) have shown that campus police agencies ”mirror,” in many ways, traditional municipal police departments. Similarities include a well-defined and paramilitary-based rank structure; comparable operational practices and written policies; equivalent levels of training; use of technology, including computers, 911 systems, and advanced communications capabilities; analogous service functions, including provision of emergency medical services and search and rescue operations; and comparable use of officer protective equipment such as body armor, batons, and pepper spray. Additionally, Paoline and Sloan (2003) found strong similarities between the organizational structure of campus agencies and that of municipal police agencies.
The Unique Challenges Facing Campus Police Agencies
Although campus and municipal police departments share many of the same tactical and organizational characteristics, and both focus on engaging in crime control, order maintenance, and service to the community, campus police do face challenges not encountered by local law enforcement.
One unique challenge faced by campus law enforcement involves federal crime reporting requirements. Unlike their municipal counterparts who may choose to release local crime statistics to the FBI each year, campus police agencies are under strict mandate from the Clery Act to make campus crime statistics available to current and prospective students, parents, and university employees each year. Failure to do so may result in sanctions, including reductions in federal financial aid for the college or university. Thus, careful record keeping and dissemination of information involving campus crime are tasks to which campus law enforcement must devote far more resources than do local police agencies.
Another unique challenge faced by campus law enforcement is the transitory nature of the college campus. While certain areas of a municipal police agency’s jurisdiction may be transitory, a college campus experiences large numbers of students graduating and new students arriving each year, along with the departure and hiring of faculty and staff and the large numbers of visitors on campus each day. This more transitory environment, particularly when combined with a large physical plant, creates unique problems that campus police must address daily through tactical and administrative considerations.
Finally, despite efforts to professionalize itself, including upgrading training and education requirements, pursuing accreditation, and transforming itself into a ”modern law enforcement agency (Sloan 1992), campus law enforcement too often confronts the perception that somehow officers are little more than ”door shakers” (Peak 1995). Because modern campus police agencies evolved from campus maintenance departments and for most of the twentieth century ”officers” were little more than security guards, old stereotypes remain. By adopting new organizational models such as the COP model, campus law enforcement will slowly help the campus community overcome its stereotypes of who campus officers are and what they represent.
Modern campus police agencies serve as the foundation for security, crime control, order maintenance, and service on college and university campuses around the nation. The twentieth century saw the growth, development, and eventual arrival of formal law enforcement entities on campus whose officers receive training not only on par with, but sometimes exceeding, the training received by municipal police officers. As we move into the new century, campus law enforcement agencies began involving themselves even more with the campus community via new ”models” of policing such as COP and POP. Such models may prove invaluable in helping campus agencies address the unique challenges they face and continue to grow and develop.
