While others enjoy the college life, junior spends time policing campus

When someone mentions “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” Meredith Alexander’s eyes light up.

A 21-year-old junior, an IU Police Department officer and a criminal justice and sociology major, she said quite simply “I am Olivia Benson,” who is a character on the TV show. But there are things that set Meredith apart from other student officers.

She’s a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority and a volunteer with IU Dance Marathon. She was once a Riley kid herself.

And in a time when binge drinking is on the rise around the nation, Meredith rides the line between the party culture and law enforcement.

Every day, Meredith said, is a choice and a chance.

***

It started in eighth grade. She was hooked on “Special Victims Unit.” Her parents were pretty sure she’d grow out of it.

She didn’t.

So the decision to come to IU was an easy one, she said. No other university in the country has a program where students can become officers before graduation, according to IUPD.

They live in the residence halls, patrol the campus in shifts and wander the madness of the tailgating fields. On occasion, they are called on to literally tackle fellow students or mediate roommate arguments.

The first week of freshman year, Meredith marched up to the IUPD station and picked up an application. Months later she was accepted. She spent last year as a cadet and all of last summer in the police academy. Now she works nearly full time as an officer.

Meredith said it’s all she’s ever wanted.

***

The night was grey, the air filled with mist. Hand on her belt, Meredith walked down a hill into the sloping field behind McNutt Quad.

“See, now that it’s rained, you can’t hear me walking,” she said.

She came here to “see what she can smell.” As she checked each copse of trees and each small valley for pot-smoking freshmen, she seemed self assured, if not completely at ease being on patrol alone.

She said it’s hard to turn the cop switch off. She needs to stay alert, always expected to be serving and protecting.
    
***

The officers met at the station at 5:30 p.m., took roll call, hopped in their personal vehicles and drove straight to Gresham Food Court, where they took their dinner break “just to get it out of the way.”

She sat with the guys. There were four of them at the table, fully dressed in
uniform with guns on their belts. The other cafeteria-goers were staring slightly.

Meredith admitted it can sometimes be difficult.

“People are sometimes more intimidated by the uniform. But I’m still the same person as when I’m in my Pi Phi clothes.”

While the guys grabbed food, she pulled out a picture from a weekend of bike training. Two oblong purple splotches mark her thigh. She fell off the bike and onto her gun.

***

She walked straight to McNutt, where she’s assigned to rounds. It’s rainy, and no one will want to smoke tonight, she said. It should be quiet.

“I’m actually a lot smaller underneath this,” she said, indicating her Kevlar and polyester uniform.

At 5’4”, she works out twice a day to make sure she’s as ready as her male counterparts. She runs, swims and lifts weights at the Student Recreational Sports Center.

“If I’m training every day and I have the mindset that I’m gonna win, well...” she said, “I’m gonna win.”
 
Lt. Greg Butler, training coordinator for IUPD, said IU’s program is different from others in the nation.

The program has existed since 1972. Its original intent was to professionalize the field of law enforcement, Butler said, while bridging the gap between students and officers.

“For the longest time, you had the ‘us versus them’ mentality,” Butler said.

Butler said officers also have to understand the responsibility that comes with service.

“If they engage with someone off the street who’s doing something they shouldn’t be doing, they have to act as a police officer,” Butler said.

That might mean they have to arrest a sorority sister, a classmate or a friend.

“If they become discretionary to that degree, they won’t be in this field very long,” Butler said.

While arrest policies haven’t changed dramatically in the last few years, Butler said the department has seen an increase in cases of extreme alcohol consumption.

Blood alcohol contents between .15 and .2, for instance, when the legal limit is .08.

Past that limit, an individual is considered to have participated in binge drinking.
 
The proportion of students who frequently binge drink jumped 16 percent between 1993 and 2001, and there is no indication that it has fallen since then, according to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

What’s more, the study found that fraternity and sorority members are more likely to drink, binge drink, drink and drive, use marijuana or cocaine or smoke than non-greeks.

Butler said he’s seen first hand the effect of the trend toward binge drinking.

“We take almost as many to the hospital as we do to jail,” Butler said.

***

“It’s good to take yourself out of being Greek for a second,” Meredith said as she stood on patrol outside of McNutt.

“Some people know there’s a Pi Phi cop,” she said.

For the most part though, she says she tries to avoid conflicts of interest.

Sometimes sisters will ask her about a ticket they were served during a tailgate.

Sometimes they want her to explain what her co-workers were thinking. And she isn’t allowed to bring her gun into the house.

She said at 21, she likes to go out and have fun.  

Yet it seems that she sacrifices much more. She said during dinner, she had to text a guy she likes and tell him no, she can’t go out this weekend, she’ll be working.

During Homecoming week, when some students spent nearly every night crowding houses to party, she worked a five-hour weeknight shift.

She planned to take someone’s Homecoming football game shift, and she acknowledged that walking through the liquor-soaked tailgating fields, she might have to arrest someone she knew.

Her roommate and sorority sister junior Allison Schmid said she thinks Meredith has to work hard to keep a steady balance.

“She doesn’t get to go out and do a lot of the other stuff we get to do.”

Schmid said she wishes people understood better the time Meredith puts into the force, the reason she might show up to dinner in uniform before running back out for rounds.  

But Meredith maintains that it’s worth it. Every party she skips, every date she misses, is another couple hours she is working toward her goal.

“Sometimes I’d just rather be doing this because I love it so much,” she said.

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