Dive Brief:
- A report by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that about two-thirds of the four-year higher education institutions with 2,500 or more students use sworn police officers, which means they can make arrests under state or local authority.
- Public colleges and universities are far more likely to have sworn police officers — 92% of them do, versus 38% at private schools.
- The percentage gap of schools using armed police is similar, with 91% for public schools and 36% for private schools.
Dive Insight:
Of the sworn campus police officers, 86% had arrest jurisdictions outside of campus boundaries and 81% had patrol duties outside those boundary lines. For higher ed institutions with more than 5,000 students, 91% of the campus police departments had designated personnel for general crime prevention, 86% for rape prevention, 79% for drug education, 78% for alcohol education, 75% for victim assistance, and 69% for intimate partner violence. A higher percentage of public school law enforcement agencies met regularly with special interest groups than did their private school peers.