With the University of Wisconsin still dealing with the aftermath of the alleged hate crimes that occurred in Ogg Hall last December, one aspect of the incident has not gone unnoticed in the UW community: alcohol.
The four students charged for vandalizing the door of a campus LGBT liaison's room had reportedly been drinking for much of the night and were intoxicated.
It is a factor that UW administrators and police officers have noticed in many of the crimes that occur on and around campus, causing them to reflect on Madison's drinking culture.
"People here over-consume alcohol with a passion I have not seen anywhere in all my walks of life," UW Interim Associate Dean of Students Elton Crim said in a recent interview. "The No. 1 thing students can do to help campus safety is to stop drinking too much."
According to the most recent crime statistics from UW, there were 646 arrests for liquor-law violations on campus — which is defined as any university-owned building or property — in 2004, up from 559 in 2003.
"If we could remove one thing from the whole mix — the one thing that makes the biggest impact on the bad things that befall students — we all would choose alcohol," UW Police Department Assistant Chief Dale Burke said. "The University of Wisconsin takes alcohol to a whole new level."
While both Crim and Burke believe alcohol is a primary factor in crime on campus, neither believes the solution is to try to eliminate alcohol from the picture altogether.
Rather, both Crim and Burke said they advocate educating students on the importance of drinking responsibly and not over-consuming.
"We can't stop students from drinking," Crim said. "But I hope to see a movement from students to really start to reexamine this culture that encourages them to drink as much as they drink."
Though it might be a surprise to many underage UW students, Burke said the goal of the UWPD is to not bust every underage drinker.
"If we're going to focus on anybody under the age of 21 with a beer in hand or that had consumed any amount of alcohol, and that was our goal, we'd probably quadruple those numbers," Burke said, referring to 2004 UWPD statistics that showed the number of underage alcohol citations given by UWPD has decreased every year since 2000, from 805 that year to 590 in 2004.
"We're not out there looking for every 18-to-21-year-old who has had a beer in any given night," Burke added.
Burke said the drop in underage alcohol citations written was merely a result of how many officers UWPD can "throw" at the problem, and that police have other concerns on campus requiring their attention.
Among those other concerns are theft — overwhelmingly the most prevalent crime on campus — and aggravated and sexual assault.
Accounting for more than 80 percent of all incidents reported to UWPD, 482 cases of theft were reported in 2004, up from 358 cases the previous year.
Burke described most theft as "crimes of opportunity" and said that as the university and the city of Madison continue to grow — and items such as laptops and iPods continue to get smaller — the threat of theft will continue to increase.
"We're not decreasing the number of buildings we have — we're increasing," Burke said. "That number is never going to become a zero."
Despite the increase in aggravated assaults on campus from 2003 to 2004, when the numbers rose from two in 2003 to nine in 2004, the statistics for aggravated and sexual assault have remained more or less stable since 2000, never rising above 14 and only aggravated assaults dropping below five — once, in 2003.
As with drinking, both Burke and Crim spoke of the vital role personal responsibility plays in preventing future incidents, such as being aware of one's surroundings, being in an alert state of mind and protecting personal property.
"There's the conception that safety is something done for [people]," Crim said. "The unfortunate part about that is there's nothing more people can do than what an individual can do for [himself]."
