Eliminating redundancies

On Friday, as my roommates and I observed the bicker club pickups from the comfort of our suite in Butler, we noticed that each group passing through the quad was joined by a stiff-looking Public Safety officer (or two, in the case of Tiger Inn). The officers looked out of place, being the only ones in the group who didn't look festive. Yet, from what we saw, they also looked bored, like referees at a kids' basketball game. Indeed, they seemed to serve little purpose at all.

The fact that the Public Safety officers on duty Friday had nothing better to do than shadow the eating club pickups highlights how safe we students are. I have only met two victims of on-campus crime, and in both cases the crime was merely bike theft. The safety of our campus leads to the conclusion that if an efficient system minimizes redundancies, Princeton would benefit from reducing the Public Safety force.

The University could significantly decrease the size of the Public Safety force and still have a larger security presence than other comparable universities. Consider Dartmouth College, the Ivy most similar to Princeton in terms of student body size and population of the surrounding town. In 2004, Princeton University's crime rate (defined as crimes per student) was 12 percent higher than Dartmouth's, but our Public Safety force remains 46 percent larger (per student) than Dartmouth's.

One might wonder why the University hasn't already taken steps to reduce the size of Public Safety to a point where there wouldn't be officers left with little to do. I believe that the answer is simple: overprotective parents. As long as there are parents who wonder if there is a way to monitor when their child eats meals (as one parent asked at the Butler College parents' open house), there will be parents who insist that any amount of campus security is too little.

The University should therefore make a greater effort to convince parents of how genuinely safe our student body is. Some need reminding that, unlike Yale, which has its own police division in addition to a security force to protect what my friend there refers to as New Haven's "four square blocks of goodness," Princeton has no need for a large security presence.

Unfortunately, the oversized Public Safety force isn't the only security redundancy plaguing the University. For example, consider the policy of bag-checking that is in effect at all campus libraries. As any student or would-be thief knows, a book could be stolen in any number of ways.

Allow me to illustrate the standard bag checking procedure for those who haven't had to waste a minute or two waiting in line to be checked at Firestone. Imagine you are tired from a long evening studying in Firestone, and you only want to go back to your room and sleep. But, because it is closing time, an exit line has formed. As each person reaches the front, the main section of each backpack — but usually not the backpack's smaller sections and never the pockets of a jacket — is checked moderately thoroughly by a library attendant. The flaws in this procedure are obvious.

Perhaps the various instances of on-campus security redundancy are indicative of a larger trend at play in the United States today. We've all had to go through the ordeal that is airport security, where there are often three TSA employees watching the x-ray monitor to make sure that we didn't try to sneak cuticle scissors onto our flight. The new mandate that all airplane passengers put their carry-on liquids in a Ziploc bag is just as nonsensical. Similar to what is happening on a small scale here at Princeton, the government has hired an excessive amount of security and is enforcing dubious regulations.

There must be an optimal balance between too much and too little security on both the local and national scale. Right now, the balance is tipped squarely in favor of too much security. Naturally, overprotection is better than the reverse, but it is hard to support irrational policies or superfluous security spending in already secure areas. There is more than enough room to lower spending and remove certain policies.

For now, we'll have to live with seeing Public Safety officers drinking coffee at the Wawa and Public Safety cars driving up and down Elm Drive every couple of minutes. Despite the fact that most campus crime could be eradicated by assuring that every bike-owning student has a working bike lock, the University conforms to the national theme of excess security. Just make sure to keep your liquids in a Ziploc bag and your hidden library books in your backpack's side pocket. Michael Medeiros is a freshman from Bethesda, MD. He may be reached at mmedeiro@princeton.edu.