Many universities have a separate police department than the city in which they're located. This makes some sense with big schools, and even more so for large public schools (Cornell is private), since they're essentially a separate government than the city.

I teach nights at a large university with its own UPD, and they're excellent. Their officers are better trained and accustomed to the kind of law enforcement that works best with universities.

When 19yo kids are drunk, high, and loud pattying in a dorm room, they show up and ask them to tone it down and offer to arrange a free ride home for anyone instead of arresting people like the city police do in off-campus apartments.

When a student is having a meltdown, instead of shooting them they try to calm them down and arrange for them to see one of the university's counselors.

When a local creep is being a creep around the college girls, they trespass them from university grounds.

They're part of the university, but the university deans have no more influence on them than the planning director of a city has on their police department. Overall, UPD is great.

Parking services, on the other hand, can go to hell. $800 a semester for a faculty pass to still get parking tickets for daring to have my car in the lot for a specific 4 minute stretch between 6:38 and 6:42 when it's a commuter pass only lot, which I should have known because of the Cyrillic text written in invisible ink on a brochure from 1978.

That's the weirdest part. Do they run murder investigations too?

Pretty sure some university police are state troopers, so it makes sense they're have jurisdiction within the campus, but no clue how that would work with private universities.

150 points from Griffindoor!

Campus police are actual police. They handle all crimes in their jurisdiction. Yes, you could argue there's a conflict of interest.

Generally, the state police aren't involved in singular, local crimes. That's why giving them a role is new.

Most universities like Cornell are backed by extremely rich, extremely influential alumni who keep giving them far more money than they can actually use precisely so their kids can enjoy the same rape culture they did.

It doesn’t help that Cornell law produces some of the best lawyers in the country.

One of the fraternities at my first college got kicked off campus because the frat brothers beat up a pledge and kicked him down the basement stairs where he broke his neck and died. His corpse wasn't discovered until late the next day after a campus-wide search. No criminal charges resulted because the police couldn't determine who had actually done it. The frat just moved to an off-campus house where their parties became even more popular because of the complete lack of oversight.

It's not different. You're not going to stop college kids from partying. They'll just go to an unaffiliated house and continue.

I know Cornell wants to be seen as doing something, but this is actually counterproductive. It pushes the parties underground, where there's less safety and oversight.

Had a similar thing in the early 2000’s - an on campus frat got in trouble for serving minors and was forced to not have any parties for the next year. Basically just meant that they couldn’t have big weekend parties or anything really big with invitations on campus. They could still have folks over during the week and the quarterly parties were just at off campus venues

you can't stop people from having a completely unrelated™ off campus event, so why bother doing anything more than telling them to change the name of the on campus event

First amendment guarantees freedom of association.

There are plenty of non frat spaces that you can have parties. Independent houses, apartments, clandestine dorm. You don't need frats to congregate and get intoxicated.