In a study of colleges nationwide, it was found that both campus security and local law enforcement were reluctant to cite students for alcohol abuse. If they did anything, they usually sent them to university discipline boards, not the court system.

Samantha Watkins at The College Fix has the story:

Alcohol Citations For Students Rarely Issued, Law Enforcement Survey Finds

Campus security and local law enforcement officers aren’t eager to issue citations to students for alcohol violations, refer such students to the campus health center or even tell their parents, according to a survey of directors of campus police and security at 343 colleges in the U.S.

The study by University of Minnesota and University of Maryland-College Park researchers also found that smaller colleges and private colleges were less likely to issue citations than larger colleges and public colleges, researchers told HealthTalk at the University of Minnesota’s Academic Health Center.

The results from “College Law Enforcement and Security Department Responses to Alcohol-Related Incidents” will be published in the August issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

It’s the first study to monitor enforcement actions for alcohol laws in “a large, nationally representative sample of colleges,” Toben Nelson, University of Minnesota associate professor of public health and co-author of the study, said in a release on the science news service EurekAlert.

College students are more likely to binge drink in a 30-day period than non-college peers their age because of the “high density” of bars and liquor stores, frat houses serving to underage students, cheap drink specials and “a student social life that emphasizes drinking,” Nelson said.

The study found “it was rare for campus security or law enforcement officials to issue citations for students involved in an alcohol-related violation or incident,” Ken Winters, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a co-author of the study, told USA Today College.

Students were more often “referred for discipline or sanctions to other officials within the university, rather than in formal courts,” Nelson told HealthTalk.