Policing the Ivory Tower: Students’ Perceptions of the Legitimacy of Campus Police Officers

Abstract

Policing research has largely overlooked how college students’ perceptions of the legitimacy of campus police officers can be enhanced and diminished. Using data from interviews and focus groups with students and staff, along with data from two field observations, this article finds that although students expect the campus police to protect them from harm, they believe that officers should fulfill this function while not interfering with their lives as college students. Further, students delegitimize the power of the campus police by raising questions about their status as “real” officers and highlighting how they overreact to the wrong types of behaviors.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author thanks Jody Miller, Andres Rengifo, Rod Brunson, Karen Rosenblum, Shannon Davis, and Jim Witte, along with the anonymous reviewers at Deviant Behavior, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Notes on contributors

Shannon K. Jacobsen

SHANNON K. JACOBSEN is a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. She received her M.A. in Sociology from George Mason University in 2012. Among her current research interests are the intersections of various social inequalities (particularly race, class, and gender) in the occurrence of crime and violence; fear of crime on college and university campuses; and the role of social control in our daily lives.