Our View: WSU dorm patrols compromise students’ rights
Imagine you’re in your skivvies in your bedroom about to take a shower. Rather than dress, you wrap a towel around yourself for modesty’s sake to cross the hallway into the bathroom. Maybe you don’t even do that. Now imagine your surprise as you emerge from your bedroom, when you see a security officer with his ear to the door of a bedroom down the hall.
You’d consider the intrusion to be an invasion of privacy, no matter what the reason for it. You’d be mad.
Washington State University students should be concerned that the school could resume a policy that allows campus police patrols of their dorm hallways. The university will suspend patrols this fall pending an appeal of a May 19 decision by Whitman County Superior Court Judge David Frazier in a criminal case and legal and procedural inquiries. The law in similar matters may be on the university’s side. It shouldn’t be. In dismissing charges in two cases against three WSU students snagged by police patrols, Frazier ruled understandably that students have a “reasonable expectation of privacy in the corridor/hallway” of their dorms.
On the surface, the cases themselves could win sympathy for WSU’s suspended policy. In one instance, two WSU students were arrested on felony burglary charges after Officer Matthew Kuhrt overheard their suspicious conversation coming from a dorm room. In the second case, Kuhrt got a warrant after smelling marijuana smoke emitting from a dorm room, and a female student was caught with drugs in her purse.
WSU officials might argue that the arrests and prosecutions reinforce their claim that the patrols protect student safety. They also contend that the patrols establish bonds between students and officers, as if collegians consider rapport with law authorities to be a priority. In the process, however, the patrols also subject the majority of law-abiding students to unnecessary surveillance and suspicion in an area that, in practice, is private not public, despite what university officials and prosecutors say. Only residents and guests have access to the dorm floors. And the floors are locked at night.
Steve Martonick, a Pullman attorney who represented one of the defendants in the Whitman County cases, provided the proper analogy for the hall patrols when he told The Spokesman-Review: “If you don’t mind the police peeking in your window, going in the backyard and peeking around, then you probably won’t mind” what the WSU officers did.
WSU and other regional universities, like the University of Washington, that embrace hallway patrols as a matter of policy should rely on floor or hall managers to prevent theft, burglary and petty crimes rather than campus police. Students have paid hefty sums to be taught, housed and fed. They are no longer kids, although some of them continue to act like children. They should be treated like young adults until they forfeit that privilege by becoming troublemakers.
Understandably, Washington State is trying to provide a safe learning environment in a time of increasing lawlessness, even on campus. But WSU tried to extract too high of a price for safety – possibly an unconstitutional one – by compromising students’ right to privacy to catch an occasional thief or drug user.