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Before the campus community’s imagination runs away with the implications of the Department of Public Safety bringing in its first K-9 unit, filling out the picture with images of Gestapo-style police dog raids on the residence halls, a few salient facts should be considered.
First, the dog is not trained to attack. The likelihood of students getting mauled in the execution of the dog’s duties is slim. Frankly, he looks too cute to be a killer.
Second, DPS cannot enter any student’s room without justifiable cause. Of course, students possessing controlled substances in their dorms do so at their own risk when a police K-9 is sniffing down the hallway.
Third, drug busts on campus are rare; in 2003 there were 21 drug-related incidents on campus, nine of which were in the dorms. For a campus of more than 22,000, that’s hardly an epidemic.
This would seem to indicate that there is probably not a raging drug problem at the University of Louisville. Knowing this, DPS will probably find sweeps of residence halls a strong deterrent against drug-related activity rather than a fruitful method of busting scores of students on possession charges.
Nonetheless, it’s important for students to remember that no matter how casual their drug use might be, it is still illegal on university grounds, and a visit to the county lockup can very well ruin one’s semester.
We commend DPS on its efforts to keep drugs off campus. However, there will be places the dog can’t sniff, places the officers won’t look. The plain facts are that universities will never be free from drug use. The steps that campus police are taking merely curtail drug usage on campus. This is a step in the right direction towards seeing that their use and trafficking on campus is kept to a bare minimum.
