“But I told the police!”
The immediate followup to that needs to be “The University Police or the real Police?”
Large universities present lots of unique problems, especially if they exist in small towns like State College, PA. The local government is very dependent on the University for its employment and revenue – but generally the University does not want local law enforcement playing any role in the University. If the local police department were to launch an undercover investigation to find pot smokers on campus or underage drinking, the city’s police chief would be out of a job so fast…
So most college towns have an “arrangement”, with different levels of formal legal structure. The “University Police” handle the crime that happens at the school, and for the most part the regular police just stay away. The “University Police work for the school, are generally not well trained – their main day to day duties are handing out parking tickets and directing traffic at the football games. Things that are crimes out in the real world are usually just treated as administrative matters in the college’s code of conduct, with the most serious penalty being you get kicked out of school.
So it is not in the interest of the University that the University Police actually respond in a meaningful way to an alleged crime. Universities vie with each other for the title of “Best Party School” or “Best Sports Teams”, not “School with the most women who wake up after a night of partying and think they may have been raped”. So “reporting” something to University police is basically going to result in nothing more than them trying to convince you that nothing happened, or at most “writing up a report”.
http://www.rapeis.org/activism/campus/campus.html
A few years ago, Congress made an attempt to “fix” this systemic problem
http://www.securityoncampus.org/index.php?Itemid=60&id=271&option=com_content&view=article
I lived in State College for many years, and I still reside within 40 miles of it. I used to write for The Centre Daily Times (Knight-Ridder back then), The State College daily rag, covering municipal government and PSU. I covered the disgraceful Graham-Spanier-sanctioned “Sex Fair”several years ago, and I almost had an attack of the vapors when I heard Dr. Laura read practically word for word the story published under my byline a few days earlier. The campus police, in contrast to the SCPD, I found to be dour if not openly surly and often uncooperative. My understanding is that the campus cops are a state-level LEA, but not State Troopers, of course, with campus jurisdiction. They purportedly worked in close cooperation with the SCPD, but I often wondered, especially after conversations from time to time with SCPD policemen from lieutenant to patrolman. Anyway, the upshot of this is that the PSU Police had the authority to get involved. Why they didn’t makes me want to get back into the reporting business, at least for a short while.
too much “diversity training” and “inclusiveness seminars” to handle any real law enforcement