Is the uptick in patrolling campus law enforcement officers helpful?

The Atlantic digs in:

The Rise of Law Enforcement on College Campuses

Bill Taylor, the chief of police at Texas’s San Jacinto College, has spent four decades patrolling higher-education campuses. A veteran in the field, Taylor said his niche line of law enforcement dates to the 1960s and ‘70s—an era of widespread student unrest amid the Vietnam War and racial segregation, as well a growing concern that local and state police forces weren’t doing enough to mitigate the disorder. He’s seen lots of changes and improvements since then.

“What happened to students and people protesting? They got brutalized. Some of them got killed,” said Taylor, who also serves as president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, a professional trade organization. And that in turn prompted colleges and universities to rethink their approach to security. “I think a lot of places started thinking, ‘If we had a police force on the campus (it would be) more attuned to our student body … our community.”

Some 50 years later, campus-police units are as ubiquitous on most college and university campuses as residence halls, libraries, and tenured faculty. Over 4,000 police departments total operate at public and private postsecondary schools, Taylor told BuzzFeed earlier this year, arguing that campus officers are different from municipal police in that they “do a better job of interacting with the public.” Indeed, the University of Pennsylvania criminologist Emily Owens has found that, collectively, college police departments are more focused on student safety than on local law enforcement, typically adopting a “harm reduction model of crime control.”