Campus officers’ sanctioning of alcohol-involved crime: influences on discretionary decision-making

Abstract

Universities are a hotbed of alcohol consumption, which is a major contributor to campus crime. In the US, campus police are responsible for handling crimes on campus. Like municipal police, campus officers are afforded the power to make discretionary sanctioning decisions. The question for this paper is what affects those decisions? To explore that topic, data collected during ride-alongs with campus officers are analyzed. Campus officers explained their sanctions as being affected by nine factors. The findings suggest that influences on campus and municipal officers’ sanctioning decisions are largely similar. The paper concludes by discussing implications for future research.

Keywords:

• campus police
• discretion
• alcohol-involved crime
• ethnography

Notes

1. To protect the confidentiality of participants, the university’s name cannot be revealed. Therefore, a full reference for the census or university’s statistics is not provided.

2. A student disciplinary action is a sanction given to university students who violate university policy or criminal law. It is drawn up by campus police and forwarded to the Office of Student Conduct, and may result in punishment by the university’s judicial affairs office.

3. This rate is similar to that of McClelland and Teplin (2001), which to date is the only empirical examination of the nature and extent of police–citizen encounters involving alcohol; they did not, however, examine officers’ sanction decisions.