A night on patrol: Miscellany reporter shadows Security officers

For this investigative piece, Features Editor Ruby Cramer shadowed several Security Officers on the night of Thursday, Feb. 12. The following is a first-hand account of her experiences.


"We don't knock on random doors, you know?" says Mike. "Even if we hear music or loud noises or whatever. The only time we knock on the students' doors is if we've gotten some kind of complaint called in by another student." Mike Phillips is a Security Officer doing rounds tonight in Zone 8, which includes Cushing and Noyes Houses and the Pine Path.

It's Thursday, and he's on the last eight-hour shift from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., when the walking is long and the campus is dark, deserted and still. It's sometime around 2:30 a.m., and we are about to finish Mike's second walk-through of Cushing. He's explaining to me that, contrary to what students at Vassar think, Security doesn't go looking for parties to bust—students call in complaints that they've got to respond to. It's their job.

"I think a lot of students think we go looking for stuff, that we're trying to bust a party," says Mike as we walk through Three-Trans. "Really, 99 percent of the time, it's coming from a complaint filed by another student. Most kids out here think that that's all we want to do—to write up students. That's not the case at all. It's the farthest thing from our minds. No one goes out and says, ‘Oh, I'm going to write up so many students.' We wish people would understand where we're coming from," he says as we round the corner of Three-West and head for the staircase. "I think that's the problem—they don't realize that we're here to help them."

Mike has been working here for nearly 10 years—he started when he got out of college in 1999 and "fell into the job," which he's glad he did. He loves it, he says.

He has close-cropped hair that he's hidden beneath a red Vassar baseball cap. He's young; before I met him, his supervisor, Sergeant Lewis Rabin, told me that "Mikey" was diligent, that he can walk fast and that I should be warned that it's tough keeping up with him.

We head down the stairs and into the first floor of Cushing. There's no one around and it's dark, save for the faint glow of the three vending machines humming behind us. I'm about to go to bed when a radio call comes in from the Campus Response Center (CRC).

"A caller made a complaint about underage drinking in Noyes on the fourth floor," says a man's voice on the other end. "I don't know her name. She doesn't want to give it or get into trouble or anything, but she just called it in."

When he listens to the call, Mike's face remains unchanged, and I see that he's unfazed. This is neither good nor bad—it's all standard, all routine. Mike motions to me as he starts to make his way to the exit, and I run a little to catch up. Neither of us speaks as we leave the front of Cushing and cross the dark parking lot to the back of Noyes, carefully navigating around heaped-up snow and patches of ice.

Another call comes in, breaking the silence: A student walking to the Terrace Apartments saw somebody spray-painting the side of Kenyon Hall. Another officer on the radio says he'll go look, and Mike says that we'll probably go to Noyes instead, but we'll wait a couple of minutes to see what happens. "They usually run whenever they see someone coming," says Mike looking out into the darkness toward Kenyon. "We get this pretty often, actually."

The call comes in that the guy is gone already and that Kenyon was left untouched, and so we go in Noyes, walking up one staircase, then another, then another, and another, until we're at the top floor, heading west toward the end of the hall.

No one's around except one girl whom we pass on the way; she's dressed and ready for bed and is sitting in the hallway on the floor against the wall, talking out loud to her computer—video chatting, I guess. At seeing us pass, she stops speaking, stares at Mike, and, giving us a wary look, whispers to her screen, "It's Security!"

I don't know if Mike hears this, but I do. He's already steps ahead, knocking at the door of the room in question. Laughing voices and loud rap music are roaring and thumping through the walls. "Vassar Security," says Mike as he thumps twice on the door. The voices falter, the laughter fades, the music stops. "Vassar Security," Mike says again, leaning in toward the door. He does not speak harshly; he does not yell—he just says it, as if he were saying hello or goodbye.

A guy opens the door an inch or two, and Mike peeks through: "Can you open the door, please? We got a complaint of underage drinking." The door opens slowly and with reluctance. When he's inside, Mike starts asking for names and IDs.

Inside, Natural Light beer cans cover the desks and tables like varnish on wood. There's a handle of rum lying around, and a huge collapsible table is set up in the center of the room with Dixie cups lined up in neat triangles. There are at least 15 people in there—mostly guys, but some girls too.

Another officer named Maureen appears on the scene. She's short and wears glasses and a pink and purple scarf around her neck. "Grab some names," Mike tells her. But she knows what she's there for, and she's already brought a blue gel pen from her pocket and is turning to a new page in a little spiral-bound notebook.

I stand in the hallway and watch as student after student come out of the room—some are laughing and some are pissed as hell. A guy in a "double o seven" shirt comes out and sighs at his friend who's already in the hallway. Another guy in all sweats leaves the room, arms crossed: "I've got four this semester already," he says. Someone else adds, "This is my third." They laugh.

"It's such a weird thing to make a complaint about. Underage drinking? I mean, it's weird," says a girl in blue. "I could understand if it was about noise, but, like, this?" They all stand in the hallway commiserating, while a guy in the bathroom across the hall brushes his teeth and looks at the scene in the mirror's reflection.

Inside, Maureen gathers the unopened beer cans, while Mike chats up the guy whose room it is. "Didn't I see you last week?" he says. "Yeah," says the student. "You can't win 'em all."

When we leave the room, the student addresses Mike by name—something that Mike comments on later when we are outside. He likes to have a good relationship with the students. "I like them," he had told me earlier. "We're always dealing with someone different. I always try to talk to students. Hopefully they'll see us and say hi back. Keep the communication up."

We leave the room, beers in hand, and head for the elevator. Mike struggles with the door a little bit, and when we're on our way down, we share stories about times we've gotten stuck.

Outside Noyes, Maureen turns to Mike. "Did you see all those empties?" she asks, eyes wide. He nods and hands the carton of gathered beer to Sergeant Rabin, who has since pulled up behind the building in Car 1.

The alcohol they take from students is always confiscated, but they make jokes about how they're going to drink it all later. "It's all for you," says Maureen to Rabin. "I know it's not your brand, right?" I imagine that this is probably the thousandth time they've made this same joke, and that maybe they're making it for my sake.

Maureen and Rabin leave to follow up on an EMS call that had just been made in Jewett House, and Mike and I head back to Cushing. "You see?" he says looking at me, a little excited. "It's not like I was walking down the hallway and I heard something and knocked on the door—it's because someone lodged a complaint. If I'm just walking through and the door's closed, I can't just knock on the door and go in."

It was creeping up on 2:30 in the morning, but the call about Noyes had swept a wave of energy over me which I had gone without the entire night. I'd been with Security since 11:30 p.m. and nothing had happened until Mike and I went to Noyes—up until that point, the night had been on the whole, I guess, what it usually is like five out of seven days for Security officers: still and empty and slow—non-eventful and a little bit lonely.

From 11:30 p.m. to around 1 a.m., I'd been riding in Car 6 with Officer Sam North, a really nice guy—30 years old and has been working at Vassar for five years and counting. Car 6 is the off-campus car, and drives through and around the Town Houses, South Commons, Vassar Farm—everything on the other side of Raymond Avenue.

At the start of the night, Officer North picks me up at my dorm, and I get in the car a little after 11:30 p.m. Sam is a big guy with a kind face; he's wearing a turtleneck under his uniform, and he has a small mustache and a shaven head. He's a one-handed driver, and he navigates the car well and with ease, as if he'd been doing this job in this same car for his entire life.

The heat is blasting from the vents on the dashboard, but Sam's window is cracked a couple of inches. "Not too much heat for you, is it?" he asks, taking a quick swig from a Poland Spring bottle that he's taken from the cup holder. I say no, and start asking him about where we're going and what we're doing. "There's a lockout in the THs," he says. "We get lockouts quite a bit—especially in Jewett 'cause they got the push-locks on the back of the doors."

We drive past Weinberg parking lot and the new Town Houses. "Made this a mess out here," he says suddenly. "Your article [last week] about the parking hit the nail on the head. I don't know why they did that. Definitely less parking out here. Taken me a while to get used to these new numeric labels."

I agree with him and when we're out of the car we spend some time looking for the right house—neither of us is familiar with the new system.

Once we find it, we've got to trek through the snow—which is still pretty deep—so I let him walk ahead and follow him, placing my feet inside his footsteps. On his belt he has clipped a big key ring with about eight or nine keys that rattle and jingle with each step he takes.

The three or four people in the Town House are sitting around a table drinking wine and laughing, and when they see Sam through the glass door, they get up immediately and start overflowing with drunken gratitude: Thank you, thank you so much, thank God you're here, the room's over there, thank God! Sam is good about it and has the job done fast, and in two minutes we're back in the car rolling out the parking lot toward some
faculty housing and apartments off campus.

Sam explains to me that in Car 6, you drive around to different locations and punch buttons—which look like little doorbells scattered around campus—with a wand, or a pipe, as the officers sometimes call it. Once the button is punched with the pipe, data is sent back to Security headquarters that records at what time he was at what location—a "tool of accountability," he explains.

All the while, the handheld radio resting in the center console is going loud and clear. "Transport Unit 5, reporting 10-5," says a voice, before another will chime in, "CRC to Zone 6. CRC to Zone 6," it says again as we pull up a few feet away from a three-door garage.

Sam turns to me and says, "The first swipe is on middle door." He calls it a swipe because, until this year, the old system used a card and swipe instead of a wand and buttons.
In one or two steps, he gets out of the car, reaches out to punch the button with his pipe and hops back into the drivers seat and starts again down the road.

Sam has been doing security jobs since he was 18. He's lived in Poughkeepsie his entire life. Before he worked at Vassar, he did security detail for 13 different Stop & Shops in the Mid-Hudson area. He left that job after a guy pulled a gun on him for 50 dollars worth of meat—filet mignon. "I've got a son, I'm married. So I said to myself, enough is enough."

He wanted to be a cop, but couldn't because of his weight. "But it's all good," he says to me. "I'm not going to go around here pretending to be cop. All that's going to get you is a meeting in the office after a student comes in and complains about what an asshole you are. That's not what it's about. You have to be able to have a bit of a rapport with the students and see it from their perspective, as well."

As we drive through the parking lot for the faculty apartments, he tells me that it's been pretty quiet tonight, and I ask him if that's more of a good thing or a bad thing.
"If something happens, it's good because it makes the night go by kinda quicker—if it's slow, it kind of drags."

Then I ask him if it gets boring. He hesitates for a moment. "It's whatever you make it," he says quickly. "We have plenty of things to do. We patrol off campus, patrol the grounds, just look for anything suspicious, anything out of the norm. Sometimes we'll cross paths with another officer, but most of the time, you're pretty much on your own," he says looking out into the darkness.

The campus is different at night. After seeing it during the day with all its energy—with students walking to and from class, with cars rolling in and out of campus—it seems not only empty, but deserted, deprived of life.

I ask him if he minds all that time alone, and he doesn't really respond. "It's whatever you make it," he says again. No one wants to admit that his job is boring, but I image that it's a lot of time alone, a lot of solitude, walking and driving with nothing else but your own thoughts.

By now, we've driven past the faculty apartments on Vassar Lake Road and are turning onto Hooker Avenue, headed for the farm, where the second button is.

"Couples or non-students sometimes ride through the farm. After dusk, it's pretty much off-limits out here. We just want to make sure there's nothing going on that shouldn't be," Sam says as we drive through the gate.

We've already "hit our swipe," but we drive out on the dirt paths of the farm just in case there's anything to see. It's so dark now, though, that I can't even see the fields to the left and right—just the dirt road ahead, illuminated by the lights of the Honda.

After we leave the Farm, we cruise by Security headquarters, which he calls "twenty-five hundred" because of its street number on New Hackensack Road; we drive past the old bike shed; we park and walk through New Hackensack Building, which, under construction, is covered with wires and foam and broken pipes; we walk through Skinner Hall, locking doors as we go; and then we drive through the South Commons parking lot, where Sam looks for any car lights that may have been left on accidentally.

We've hit a few buttons on our way, and are almost done with the first of Sam's three go-rounds.

On the way out of the lot, Sam tells me that he wishes there were a better relationship between students and Security officers. "My personal opinion is that the biggest downfall of this job are the attitudes and the disrespect we get. I'm here trying to look out for you and your best interest. I'm sorry that you're gonna get in trouble, or that what I'm telling you is not what you want to hear or do," he says, starting to gesticulate. "I'm not trying to bust your chops."

We're driving over to Cushing, where I'm to meet Mike and go on rounds with him on the Pine Path and in Cushing—and then later, as I'm soon to find out, go to Noyes and write up about 15 students for underage drinking.

I ask Sam if he plans on sticking around at Vassar. "I don't plan on going anywhere," he says, "but I hate the static between some of us and the students. Personally I'm not much of an asshole, but most kids here would beg to differ."

He's about to let me out of the car and back into the darkness, when he turns to me and he says, "It's just hard when, the kids—depending on the situation," he pauses, "when they sometimes wear you too thin. Not everybody treats us the best, you know?"