C.U.P.D. Crack Down: Fact or Fiction

For many students, the beginning of the academic term means that the party season has begun. Students want to send out the summer with a bang and ring in the university’s homecoming ‘the right way.’ This phenomenon has been around for generations of college students. 

    This semester, however, things have been different. According to students, the Concord University Police Department has been actively pursuing party-goers. Night after night, complaints have been voiced against the C.U.P.D., accusing the officers of targeting party-goers and going out of their way to break up parties both on campus and off. Even more extreme accusations claimed that the police were going to cite any person under the legal drinking age that was caught with a red solo cup, regardless of whether it contained alcohol or not. 

    These party-hunting allegations were particularly serious during Concord’s Homecoming Week. These accusations popped up left and right as supposedly one party after another was broken up by the police. One student’s anonymous social media post read “I just wish the police would let us have one night, just one night of not busting our parties.”

    The Concord University Police Department denies the allegations of targeting parties for their own purposes. Concord University Chief of Police Mark Stella explains that any perceived influx in the police’s intervention with student partying is due to noise complaints from the Athens community. “When someone is playing the radio too loud, guess what? That elderly lady or elderly man or the people in this small community, which are used to it being quiet, are going to call that in,” explains Chief Stella. He also states that this occurrence becomes more prevalent at the beginning of the academic term as the community has to adapt to the sudden influx of students moving onto campus, saying “Come mid-August, we have upwards of a couple thousand people all of the sudden. Then you have the community that’s used to it being quiet, and suddenly Athens becomes busy…a lot of things start to transpire.”

    Chief Stella emphasizes that the issue is not that students are trying to party and have a good time, but that students get overly rowdy and draw the attention of the community, who then decide to get the police involved. Once the police department receives a complaint, it is their duty to investigate the complaint, and if the instance they are called to happens to feature illegal activity, they have no choice but to take action. For them, it isn’t about a crackdown or stricter enforcing of the rules. “We have to go out and address those problems that the community has, that’s our job. As for a complete crackdown, no. We’re here to keep the peace. We’re here to enforce West Virginia State laws, enforce Concord University policy, and we’re here to assist these students and anyone that uses this campus to keep this a safe learning environment,” says Stella.

    Stella says that neither he nor any of the C.U.P.D. believe that the university is comprised solely of rowdy partiers. Rather, Stella believes that it is a case of “the minority causing problems against the majority…the majority of the people stay out of trouble.” He also believes that the recent allegations of a major police crackdown are largely due to social media. When one person posts something, it can quickly spiral into something far from accurate. “It tends to get overinflated, it tends to get stretched a little bit,” he explains. 

“It all boils down to common sense and courtesy and respect,” says Stella, “That’s the way we view things here. We hate to see people get in trouble, but if we don’t do our job for the majority, the public, are we discrediting that majority?”