…but really, what is “suspicious”?

I cannot post this blog without naming the reality that as we discussed police brutality and racial profiling in class last night, students at the University of Virginia were organizing around yet another instance of policy brutality directed toward a Black man.  Martese Johnson was beaten by police, sustaining injuries that required hospital attention, on Tuesday evening.  At this point, these stories are not surprising; however, they are still maddening and tragic. And they are happening in the context of story after story of racism and sexism being perpetuated in some of our campuses most powerful campus organizations – historically White fraternities.

On Tuesday evening before my Wednesday evening class, I had a last-minute idea to do an in-class activity to explore the implicit and explicit messages in campus crime alert emails. I posted a call on Facebook for anyone willing to share Clery (or campus crime alert) emails for a class activity, hoping for a few examples to explore in class. Within 24 hours, I received 74 emails from colleagues from 22 institutions of varied institutional types. I am writing this blog post in response to several folks asking to hear what we did and how it went in class. To provide some context, the course in which this activity took place is an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion course I developed and am teaching for our PhD program. (I will also use this activity the next time I teach campus environments with masters students). Using the Adams, Bell, and Griffin (2013) educating for social justice model, I organized the course in five units throughout the semester:

• Unit 1: Theoretical Foundations (Principles of Social Justice Education, Critical Race Theory, and Intersectionality Theory)
• Unit 2: Individual Level Oppression
• Unit 3: Institutional Level Oppression
• Unit 4: Societal Level Oppression
• Unit 5: Agency & Action

The course has nine doctoral students in it, seven of whom are in their first year in the College Student Affairs Administration program. We started our unit on societal level oppression this week by discussing racial profiling and police brutality. Prior to class, we read several relatively current articles about racial profiling among college students, faculty, and staff on college and university campuses and some articles highlighting ways college and university administrators responded in Fall 2014 to the lack of indictments in the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

To set up this class activity, I provided a cursory overview of Critical Discourse Analysis (acknowledging that I know very little about the methodology myself but am trying to learn more about it). We discussed the significance of power in language and texts, the role of context in interpreting messages, and the implicit and explicit messages inherent in language and text. Students paired up and each pair received nine email messages from different institutional types highlighting a variety of crime on campuses. The emails included alerts for anything from bike theft to robbery to sexual assault to shootings.

At this point, students were instructed to identify the institutional context – is the institution public or private? How large? Is the campus in an urban, suburban, rural, or other area? What are the demographics? Other relevant information about the campus? Next, students reviewed the emails for “keywords,” defined as words that were repeated in multiple emails or words that really stood out in some way (e.g. related to power, identity, or were particularly unique or interesting).

Finally, we discussed the intersection of the context and the keywords to highlight implicit and explicit messages from the emails. Some of the messages we explored are highlighted below. These messages were generated from a 30-minute class activity, and are certainly more nuanced than can be presented here. This discussion begins to highlight the tension in meeting legal and ethical obligations with differential impact on members of a campus community.

It is “on you” to keep yourself safe. Messages implicit in the alerts included responsibility for individuals to “keep themselves safe.” Although safety tips may be an important component of educating college students and the general public, they also place responsibility on potential “victims” to protect themselves rather than “perpetrators” to stop engaging in harmful behavior. Safety tips seemed generic and similar for all crimes and contained suggestions like “be aware of your surroundings” and “use the campus escort service.” Of all of the emails we reviewed, only one included information about the legal definition of sexual consent and explicitly stated, “Responsibility lies with the perpetrator, not the survivor –­­ no one deserves, asks for, or provokes sexual assault.”

In addition to the safety tips sections of the emails placing responsibility on individual people to keep themselves safe, many of the descriptions of incidents also sent victim-blaming messages. For example, in describing a sexual assault situation, one email concluded with “the victim was drinking so she doesn’t remember some details of the situation.” Another message indicated the “victim was on her phone” insinuating that if she had not been on her phone, she would have been more aware and could have “prevented” the crime. These tidbits of information were not relevant in helping to identify the perpetrator of the crime (one of the alleged purpose of crime alert emails), so we questioned their relevance in the message. The use of the word “victim” was also pervasive and left us with a message of disempowerment juxtaposed with the notion of the need to “protect ourselves” from crime.

Certain people are perpetrators; others are victims. As is probably not surprising, the messages inherent in the alerts presented relatively consistent pictures of who is a “suspect” and who is a “victim.” Perpetrators were overwhelmingly identified as male and victims as female. In fact, in some descriptions, the assumed gender/sex of the victim was not identified, leaving us to wonder if “unmarked” victims meant that they were identified as male. Further, in no description was there anything other than a binary gender description of a victim or suspect.

Additionally, the racialized language in the alerts highlighted the challenges with using race as a descriptor. As is also not surprising, the terms “Black” and “White” were used the most frequently to describe suspects of crime. Generally speaking, the descriptions for “Black males” were far more vague than descriptions of “White males.” Additionally, in no instance where “Black male” was used to describe the suspect was the term “college aged” used; however, some of the emails used the term “college-aged White male” to describe white suspects. The implicit message in this is highly problematic: one can be less afraid of a white male suspect because he is likely a college-student, therefore he is safe and “one of us,” but this may not be true of Black males suspected of a crime. We also noted that with the exception of very few instances of referring to “Hispanic male,” no other racial identifiers were used.

“Our” community vs. off-campus. The crime alerts also insinuated a clear message related to “us” and “them” in the tone and content. Consistent with the message highlighted above about using the terms “college-aged” to describe some suspects but not others, the idea that most of this crime happens “off campus” was pervasive. Although the legal and PR rationale behind this message is clear, it also sets up yet another instance of insinuating that “those” people are not “us,” which contributes to further assumptions and/or reinforcement of who is and is not a criminal. This also implicitly sends a message about the significance of “stranger danger” crime, even though we know that crimes are often committed by people known to the target.

What is “suspicious”? The term “suspicious” was used over and over in the crime alerts. We questioned this. What does it really mean? How does our racist and gendered socialization contribute to how we interpret “suspicious”? What are the implications of this for some students on our campus who are more likely to be seen as “suspicious” (e.g. men of Color, students perceived as “Muslim” or “Middle Eastern”)?

Legal vs. student-centered tone. The vast differences in the tone of email messages was also present. For example, many of the messages had a clear legal tone to them, insinuating “we are sending this message because we must do so to meet legal obligations.” Although this is true, these messages were in stark contrast to those whose tone took a more student-centered, awareness-raising perspective, highlighting the importance of students’ safety and concern for community members who had been harmed by crime.

So what? Implications for Student Affairs Educators In our discussion about the implicit and explicit messages in campus crime alerts, we discussed the importance nuances of legal requirements and ethical responsibilities to raise awareness about safety among students. We also raised the question, “which students?” As with many legal practices, crime alerts were developed with good intentions to keep campus community members safe and may sometimes contribute to increased awareness of high-profile serial offenders. However, as recently highlighted by students at the University of Minnesota and Yale, they also contribute to a hostile and racist climate for men of Color, specifically Black men, on many campuses. We acknowledged the complexities of providing enough information to be helpful in identifying potential perpetrators of crime without contributing to negative stereotypes for students who already experience a hostile campus environment. We asked the question at what point is it helpful to provide information on the perceived race and gender of a perpetrator? At what point is it more harmful than helpful?

We also discussed the implications of perpetuating a “stranger danger” mentality among students on a campus. Although we believe it is ok to remind students to be aware of their surroundings and to consider using campus escorts systems, we would like to supplement that message with information about the actuality of crime on college campuses, highlighting the reality that college students often commit crimes toward one another. Additionally, we believe it is important for students to understand that “alerts” only go out when there is a perceived on-going threat to campus, which has been practiced as crime that occurs between strangers and is often “unresolved,” rather than “resolved” crimes between acquaintances. Therefore, even though the annual crime reports come out each year, the on-going messages campus community members may be receiving about crime is to be aware of “strangers” to keep themselves safe. Paired with unchecked socialization about what looks “suspicious,” this is a recipe for disaster on so many levels. Not only does it perpetuate a hostile climate for students who fit the stereotype of “suspicious,” it may also decrease students’ self-protective strategies around people they “know” or who “look like college students” because they have learned that they should be afraid of “strangers” and not their peers.

We also discussed our role as student affairs educators in addressing these issues. We identified three specific strategies for working in our circles of influence to counter these messages. We acknowledge, that unfortunately, these strategies do little to address racism at a systemic level – they are, in fact, individual level responses that merely put a band-aid on symptoms of a larger, deeply rooted, system of oppression. Nonetheless, these are strategies we can employ in our daily work to begin to challenge systems and support students who are striving to navigate an otherwise hostile environment:

1. Ask questions of those in leadership positions about the crime alert messaging. For example, we could ask, “What do you mean by ‘suspicious’?” “Who are we aiming to protect?” “Who might be harmed by this message?”
2. Next, we email or call the senders of alerts if we have concern about their content. By developing relationships and communicating with campus security, communications staff, and others who write these alerts, we can begin to highlight the problematic nature of many of the messages and seek to change them. For example, it is likely that the email we reviewed that had accurate information about the dynamics of sexual assault on college campuses came as a result of people reaching out and making the argument that other messages were victim-blaming and seeking change.
3. Finally, we can provide counter-messages to the students with whom we have direct contact. By asking questions, sharing accurate information, and validating students who experience these alerts as re-victimizing or contributing a racist, hostile climate, we may empower them to speak up as well.