First Run In With Campus Police

Reagan198412 years ago

During some point in your fraternity life at college, you are bound to have some interaction with the campus police. My first one was, well, a hell of a night.

At my school, the campus police is referred to as DPS (Department of Public Safety). It was during Greek Week 2012, and was a night like none other. Our Greek Week team had parties every night, and this was Thursday, so it was the night of Progressive. For those of you who are unfamiliar, a progressive party is one in which you begin at one location, finish all the booze they have there, then you walk, or progress, as a huge group to the next location, and so forth. The last location was my fraternity house, and I had already consumed enough drinks to take down an oversized elephant. The first house consisted of summer brew, the next some terrible jungle-juice loaded with cheap vodka and barely any mixer. The third house had boxes upon boxes of Franzia, all of which was consumed using the classic slap-the-bag technique. The final house, mine, served straight shots out of multiple types of handles. Being the rowdy gentlemen we were, we felt it more important to have copious amounts of liquor, and fewer mixers to chase them with. After about 20 minutes of walking around handing out shots, and taking them along with the other partygoers, I reached an incredible blackout that nothing could bring me back from.

The rest of this story is hearsay from witnesses, although it seems to be undeniably true.

After raging for a couple more hours, and after the party had died down, I hopped into a random car which belonged to a sober pledge driver for a different fraternity. He was nice enough to drive me home, and for some reason I decided to go back to my dorm room instead of the fraternity house to sleep off this extreme drunk. After berating this kid with threats of how I was going to haze him so hard (which would’ve been impossible), I’m sure he regretted his decision to allow me in his car. After somehow swiping into my dorm, I puked all over the communal bathroom, told my RA to go fuck himself, and made it into my room. I passed out, but was rudely awoken by another fit of vomiting, luckily into an empty box my parents had sent a care package in. Not wanting such a vile substance in my room, I walked out to the door and tossed said box onto the sidewalk. Unbeknownst to my blackout self, my name and room number were on this box.

I woke up at noon, having missed all my classes for the day, to an incredible hangover. My GDI roommate informed me that a campus police officer had found the box, and showed up to our door at 4:00am looking for the owner. Luckily, my drunken alter-ego hid under the covers and refused to talk to the cop, most likely hiding my underage drunkenness. My roommate gave me a card belonging to the officer, with instructions that I was to call him upon waking. Naturally, I waited until 15 minutes before the department closed before calling. However, I was still requested to go and visit him.

I walked into the DPS office, the receptionist judging my clearly hungover face. After being called into his office, he berated me.

“It seemed to me very clear you were intoxicated. Is that true?”

“Oh, no. I had taken some sleeping pills because I had been sick. That’s why I couldn’t really wake up when you requested.” Completely made up on the spot, but I was proud of myself.

“Well, because you wouldn’t respond to me, I couldn’t breathalyze you or charge you with anything. But this will be sent to the Dean’s office, and you will hear about it again.”

I thanked the man, and wandered over to the house, shotgunning a beer in celebration of not getting crucified. Almost a year later, and the Dean hasn’t contacted me at all.

***

It’s only natural to have some run in with campus police, especially while living in the dorms. This is my advice: deny, deny, deny. If they don’t have hard evidence, you should probably be okay. Don’t let anything like this get you down. Drink beer in celebration of not getting fucked, but if you do get fucked, drink more beer to forget about it and move on with your life.