About a month ago my mother called me to tell me that my younger brother’s friends got busted at a party by the police. I didn’t think much of it because high school kids get in trouble for parties and underage drinking all the time, but then my mom told me that my hometown of Hudson, Mass., received a grant in December for the police department to put towards ‘monitoring’ underage drinking.

Essentially, Hudson formed a party patrol to police the area and break up parties involving underage drinking. All the minor infractions that are part of growing up like underage drinking and throwing noisy parties that used to be taken care of by parents are now dealt with by the police.

When did it become a crime to grow up? Probably around the same time the University of Massachusetts started stationing police cadets in the dormitories. As every student has probably realized, there are police in the dorms on weekend nights either stationed for the night in one location or in rotation in several dorms. These officers are meant to increase safety and decrease underage drinking. But more often, they violate the rights of the students whose safety they claim to protect.

The Fourth Amendment protects against illegal search and seizure, yet many students have been searched without their permission or without the knowledge that they could refuse a search. To find out what students in general know, I asked a few students in the Lincoln Campus Center some general questions about their experiences with the officers in the dorms.

One junior who currently lives in Coolidge and who has always lived in Southwest says that she has had several interactions with police in the dorms. She told me that at one point last year she was moving groceries and water into her building one night and the officer stationed in her building followed her back out to her car and claimed that because her car was parked illegally, he could search it without a warrant. She said he was ‘searching for drugs or alcohol, but upon finding none, proceeded to try to thank me for my cooperation.’ I asked her why she didn’t just tell him no. She said she didn’t know she could.

Another student, a sophomore living in Cance, told me about an experience that he had trying to enter the dorm with a backpack after sign-in on a Friday night. He said it was right before midterms started and he was just trying to get work done before taking a break for the weekend. He came back from the library with his backpack full of books and notebooks and just wanted to go back to his room. An officer was in the building and asked him what was in his bag.

‘Books,’ he replied. The officer asked if he could confirm that and the student said no. The officer then walked behind him and unzipped his bag and looked inside only to find books. The officer said he could go back to his room and acted like nothing strange had just happened.

‘I was so pissed,’ he told me, but seemed to think there was nothing he could do about the officer’s behavior.

Recently, I spoke with Patrick Archbald, deputy chief of UMass police over the phone. When I asked about cadets searching student bags, he was quite surprised that anyone would do so. Yet, it has been my experience and the experience of the two students I interviewed that the cadets do look in bags.

He said most students who are stopped really do not bother to hide the fact that they were bringing in alcohol.

‘Someone under 21 and walking in with a case of beer is the most common scenario we see,’ said Archbald. ‘Stopping people with closed bags is not something that we do often. We take people’s freedom to move around as they wish very seriously.’

When did mistrust and a blatant disregard for students’ rights become the norm at UMass and elsewhere in this country? I don’t know. What I do know is that catching one student with a couple beers is more important to UMass than creating a sense of trust between students and the faculty, staff and police at this institution.

What I do know is that many students don’t know their rights and that those who do feel too intimidated to say something about it. ‘ Unless we make more attempts to remain educated about our rights, we’ll wind up living in 1984 or the Panopticon.

Sara Crossman is a UMass student. She can be reached at [email protected].