Preface to Lunch Making a ruling on Public Safety regulations

Author: James O'Brien

Situation A: There are forty people - a sizable amount of kids - in a basement of one of the Ridgeline houses. Public Safety makes five appearances in a matter of four hours, hands out five citations, but allows the party to continue. Sure, five citations is a pain in the ass, but this way they know where everyone at the party is, and they have checked to see that everyone is safe - in short, they've done their jobs. In my eyes, the main purpose of Public Safety is to keep students safe, not be the "enforcer of the emptying of beer" or "reluctant killer of parties."

Situation B: There are about forty people-a sizable amount of kids-in the basement of one of the Ridgeline houses. Public Safety makes one appearance, hands out five citations, shuts down a registered party, and locks up the keg, which the residents of the house paid for so that their fellow students would have something to do on a Saturday other than pick apples and curse the fact that they go to Middlebury College. In this second situation, Public Safety has created a more dangerous situation for the students simply by forcing them to leave the house - a contained area where their activity can be monitored - in order to disperse themselves randomly about campus in the pursuit of their idea of a fun weekend.

This second situation is far more dangerous than monitoring a party while allowing it to continue. The decision to shut the party down might even be slightly more tolerable if the students hosting the party were given beer rebates, like, a coupon that says, "To: College Student Who Bought Beer. From: Middlebury College. Here's your money back. Donate it to the poor, or something. Love, Ron." As far as I know, this hasn't happened yet.

Every once in a while, when I'm formulating some sort of pathetic argument as to how my beer pong table is part of the set for a Last Supper reenactment I'm doing for film class, Public Safety will look at me with those human eyes of theirs and say, "Sorry. We're taking it. We have no discretion in this situation."

Fair enough. I would then like to recommend that, if the College insists on giving its employees "no discretion," that we should go ahead and hire robots for Public Safety positions instead of compassionate human beings. This would certainly save us valuable funds which could be spent on tire art or needless renovation. If, however, the College is going to continue to employ the intelligent, charismatic people that currently staff Public Safety, then we have to rethink the concept of giving them "no discretion." The aim of the College needs to be actually keeping students safe rather than binding its employees to a set of rules that, quite frankly, need to be reexamined. The laws were written with the intent of protecting the students of Middlebury College; however, as currently constituted, our guidelines only antagonize students and put them in more danger.

It seems to have been forgotten that we, the members of the human race, wrote the laws ourselves, and we have the power over them, as much as we seem to want to ascribe to them some sort of omnipotence. It's incredible how often people would act like they are somehow bound to words written on a page, as if they didn't have control over their own actions. Just as students need to take responsibility for their alcohol consumption, law enforcement needs to take responsibility for their actions. Far too often the guise of "following the rules" is used as an excuse not to think. Public Safety needs to be given the power of discretion and they need to use it to the best of their ability. Otherwise, I hear that the guy who invented the Segway - the dorky, glorified scooter (that gets excellent gas mileage) - is busy working on Roll-o-Cops, discretion-less robots that would be perfect for enforcing the Middlebury College alcohol policy.