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ABOUT THE QUICK TAKE Every Friday, the Quick Take columnists will offer their views on an issue of significance to American University. Notable members of the campus community will also be invited to contribute to this new feature. Suggestions for topics and other ideas from readers are welcome and encouraged, so please submit comments to edpage@theeagleonline.com. |
Earlier this month, The Eagle was forced into discontinuing its police blotter feature when AU Department of Public Safety ceased releasing narrative accounts of campus crime. This has since been replaced by a spread sheet that instead generally indicates the location, date and type of incident. How should AU students reaction to this change? Is it an unnecessary restriction of information that could ultimately harm students? Or was Public Safety justified in making the switch? Our Quick Take columnists weigh in:*
Nick Field:
Derek Siegel:
Sarah Palazzolo:
Balancing Public Safety's changes with student needs
*Note: AU Public Safety did not respond to multiple requests to contribute to this Quick Take.
Transparency vs. privacy
By Nick Field
As you may have heard, The Eagle’s popular police blotter section has been discontinued thanks to a new policy which now issues shorter, vaguer and blander reports. While many readers may be upset that a consistently hilarious section of the paper is gone, the incident points out some important questions about the press and society in general. Namely, how do we balance the public’s right to know with the right to privacy of the individuals involved?
On the one hand, this new policy conceals much of the details of campus crimes. The student body could, and to an extent has, protested that they have a right to know about the illegal activities that occur on campus. Some students may even contend that these reports could act as a deterrent; humiliation as a kind of social punishment. An issue even more serious than safety, however, is that of transparency. This new public safety policy restricts the information we have about the agency that is in charge of our security.
Yet, on the other hand, one could also argue that the old reports were so detailed that they violated the privacy rights of the individuals. Under the old method, it was much easier to infer the identities of the individuals described. Now, one could counter that a person’s right to privacy ceases when they commit an illegal activity. And someone else could respond that legal remedies shouldn’t involve the public taking enjoyment out of ridiculing someone.
Altogether, while we have a right to know what goes on in our community, we must also protect an individual’s privacy rights. That balance won’t be easy to pinpoint, it never is, but we’ll have to find a way.
Nick Field is a senior in SPA and a Quick Take columnist for The Eagle.
Policing our senses of humor
By Derek Siegel
The best jokes are unexpected—they catch you completely off guard.
So where does the police blotter come into this? While the feature’s popularity can be attributed to its easy-to-read format and educational merit, people read it because it makes them laugh. The genius behind the humor is the incongruous detail sandwiched in-between mundane facts.
March 7th, 2011: “A fire alarm activated as a result of bagels burning in a toaster in the kitchen of the Child Development Center at 10 a.m. Public Safety and Facilities Management responded. The building was evacuated.”
Luckily everything was OK. I mean, this is the Child Development Center. Presumably there could have been children there. A fire would have been terrible. But just think about it for a moment: bagels. Any sort of nefarious deed could have set off the fire alarm. But it was a bagel. A bagel! Bagels aren’t nefarious! You slather cream cheese on them. You put lox spread on them. They’re innocent as can be. Except this one stupid bagel that decides to catch itself on fire. It’s funny. Bagels in a police blotter are funny.
So here I am, having a marvelous time surveying campus crime. I can see why Public Safety may not be so keen on publishing the blotter if it isn’t always taken seriously. This may or may not be why they discontinued the feature. That being said, it raises an interesting question: is it OK to laugh at something like this that’s not intended to be funny?
My immediate response is, “Yes!” This is America, after all. We have the freedom of speech. The freedom of laughter. But if you work in the Child Development Center and your building could have caught on fire, it’s not so funny anymore. It’s a sobering thought.
What, then, separates the good humor from the bad? There’s no easy answer to this because every person has his own unique sense of what’s funny as well as a distinct sense of what’s gone too far.
Personally, though, I’d be pretty pissed if Public Safety discontinued the police blotter because students saw it as entertainment. Humor is everywhere, and even if a joke is inappropriate, you can’t stop it from being told. Why fault the entire student body because of a couple insensitive jokes? Even the police can’t police humor.
Derek Siegel is a freshman in SIS and a Quick Take columnist for The Eagle.
Balancing Public Safety's changes with student needs
By Sarah Palazzolo
Honestly, the degree of popular uproar over the change in police blotter format surprised me. I was satisfied to accept the changes and move on. However, recent editorial reactions and general public opinion have highlighted three major issues with the decision: safety, amusement, and precedent.
Rather than complaining about the change, we as a student body — and we as a newspaper — have the power to use our collective influence to respond constructively to our justified concerns.
If safety really is first, perhaps students should take some basic precautions: do we really need to read the police blotter to know that it is generally a good rule of thumb to lock our doors or to avoid wandering the tunnel alone at two in the morning?
For students concerned about how to ensure personal security, public safety has an entire section of its website devoted to crime prevention with general safety tips and more information about what programs are available for students to stay safe in the city, deal with drug or alcohol abuse, and protect against rape or sexual harassment.
Students have typically read the police blotter for reasons other than safety, and some of the blurbs are genuinely funny: see The Eagle’s “Best of Spring 2011 Police Blotters” for more. But if amusement is your chief concern about the new crime log format, you can always through backlogs of police blotters online, watch more reality TV or just get a hobby.
The most important ideological issue at stake with this change is that of precedent. In the digital age, information is power. What we have at stake here is an issue of information asymmetry. This unexplained removal of factual information may be an indicator that overall controls are tightening, which will eventually strain the relationship between the student body and the forces which genuinely work to protect us.
As responsible, informed citizens, we are not doomed to accept this relational shift without question. We do, however, have an obligation to approach it with a certain degree of diplomacy, especially considering all the positive, necessary services that our public safety office provides for every AU student, on and off campus.
To heal this divide, we need to use our voices constructively. We can try to engage public safety in dialogue (maybe through student groups, government, or even on an individual basis) to increase transparency on both sides of the debate. Students need an outlet with which to identify security needs and suggest ways that the university community can accommodate safety concerns, rather than erupting over a resolvable dispute.
Sarah Palazzolo is a freshman in the CAS and a Quick Take columnist for The Eagle.
