And of course, on the other side, we have Princeton students pregaming and throwing room parties — suffocating, cramped room parties. Students understand well that Public Safety officers are hyped up for the “bust,” so they peek out windows at timed intervals, cover alcohol with blankets and do everything in their power to avoid and deceive.
The collisions aren’t immovable-object-meets-unstoppable-force big, but they are frequent and they are a source of discomfort for all parties involved. It’s safe to say that the relationship between Public Safety officers and University students doesn’t live up to our community standards, expectations and ideals.
That we need cooperative discussions and clarifications of school policies is clear. And to that extent, the USG’s dissemination of the new “Alcohol 411” cards represents a real — if perhaps tiny — step forward.
Though recent Daily Princetonian reporting suggests that most of these cards will end up in Frist garbage bins, it’s the type of initiative that we need more of. So in the wake of the USG’s first major alcohol initiative of the year, I have a couple suggestions for how the USG and the administration can improve alcohol policies.
To start, the idea that Public Safety is out to get Princeton students has become all too prevalent — and in certain ways it’s not unjustified. In part, this relationship between Princeton students and Public Safety officers has broken down because P-Safe officers can be overly aggressive, and it is upsettingly easy for students to feel threatened, targeted or even victimized.
Though student anxieties might be artificially conceived, it is a fact that students are relatively helpless in P-Safe interrogations. When it comes to dealing with P-Safe officers, Princeton students must, according to the card, “comply and be honest.” Public Safety is supposed to be a protective force on campus; obeying or complying with them seems reasonable. But to what extent? When asked to incriminate our friends, when pigeonholed to incriminate ourselves, when pressured by an aggressive P-Safe officer, how far does compliance extend? What rights do we retain when the doors close and the questions begin?
As a point in context, when we deal with the comparatively more vicious Borough Police, we possess certain rights to protect ourselves. Sure, Public Safety officers are like Diet Borough Cops, half the calories and none of the guns, but they still act as an authority force on campus, they still interrogate, and we need rights when dealing with them. I think that is more than reasonable that this administration, Public Safety representatives and the USG agree on certain rights that students maintain in the interrogation room. Let’s call it Miranda for P-Safe.
While I appreciate well enough that it is easy to be ambitious from the soap box, the USG should start by lobbying for the following rights:
1. All students have the right to receive counsel from USG student representatives in interrogations, and the USG should set up a group to train and oversee these representatives.
2. All students have the right to refuse incriminating others under any circumstances.
I’m not so short-sighted as to suggest that the solution is simply to relax all alcohol policies. What I would like to stress is a balance in policy — strict and lax where each is appropriate. For instance, University-sponsored alcohol education needs to be more stringent. AlcoholEdu is useless because (huge, secret Princeton revelation!) it’s not mandatory. Nope. Despite what the administration tells freshmen, AlcoholEdu is effectively optional. Sobering, right? Now, I don’t doubt that AlcoholEdu is instructive. But how effective can anything be if most people aren’t taking the time to take the full course?
AlcoholEdu is a haphazard charade of smoke and mirrors, and too few are fooled. The money we pay to the makers of AlcoholEdu is just thrown down the drain merely because the administration thought that a not-so-mandatory “mandatory” program would suffice for alcohol education. Would it have been so difficult to pass on AlcoholEdu and train RCAs to teach their zees about alcohol safety? There was a proposal last year to increase the burden on RCAs in reporting alcohol violations. Why not train them to do something useful instead?
I don’t discount the value of alcohol education. In fact, I think that the level of ignorance about alcohol safety on this campus is deplorably high. I also don’t hate Public Safety: they serve a real purpose. But the fact that freshmen are circumventing AlcoholEducation and the fact that the current state of student-p-safe interactions has been reduced to a cat-and-mouse game make me more and more convinced that this University’s imbalanced alcohol policies need to be reworked.
Peter Zakin is a sophomore from New York. He can be reached at pzakin@princeton.edu.
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