Gainesville’s Green Zone?

A few days ago, the Gainesville Sun featured an article about how the University Police was patrolling areas surrounding the University of Florida campus to keep criminals off campus. You see, UF students have recently seen an upturn in the amount of armed muggings. These have predictably occurred overwhelmingly off-campus and in traditionally high-crime areas like the downtown night club zone. Nevertheless, since it was “UF students” who were victims, there has been a big cry to “protect the campus”.

Apparently, the police are searching out individuals behaving in a suspicious manner in the streets near campus. I presume (hopefully) that there is no profiling going on here (especially that of a racial nature). One of the police officials had given a comment that the police were trying to keep off campus people who didn’t belong there. But what constitutes “not belonging there”? It is public tax-funded property, after all. If one wants to jog through campus, try out one of the libraries, or attend a lecture, how can the police decide from someone crossing University Avenue onto campus whether they belong or not, unless they are in some way doing some profiling?

I can understand the need to keep people from sleeping on the campus grounds, and I also understand the need for students on campus to be secure from mugging. But for the police to have grounds for preventing access to the campus, they need to establish suspicion of an imminent crime and not be in the business of making value judgments as to who belongs there or not. Obviously, if a police officer observes someone going around a building trying different door handles, peering through windows, hanging around aimlessly at 3 am, or skulking in alleys or behind bushes, that would constitute suspicious behavior. Likewise, they are justified in responding to a call from someone on campus who is concerned about the behavior of another. But, as I said before, this all comes under the umbrella of upholding the law, not making value judgments.

Let’s not turn the wonderful, open University of Florida campus into another Green Zone with checkpoints and a martial atmosphere surrounding it. We’re not in Iraq, for crying out loud!