Maybe they were studying for their finals.
When Officer Doug Parks of Binghamton’s New York State University Police took this Pipe Dream reporter along on a ride Thursday night, not much happened. During the three hours we patrolled in car 407, we didn’t bust students smoking marijuana. We didn’t find smashed exit signs. And we didn’t pick drunk kids up off the grass.
“People going Downtown tonight?” Parks asked while he checked the car’s lights in the police station’s parking lot behind the Couper Administration Building.
It was 11 p.m. and the start of Parks’s shift, which runs until 7 a.m. five nights a week. And after 20 years of experience on the force, Parks knew the looming finals week could make for a slow night.
But finals didn’t crash all the partying. As our patrol car zipped by Newing College’s Delaware Hall, girls in party dresses ran out of their dorm to pack into a taxi van.
Suddenly, the radio squawked. Traffic stop. Vestal Parkway. Parks zoomed down to the scene, just in case his fellow officer needed back up, he said. But the stop was only for a broken headlight. And Parks drove back to campus.
The next stop was the Lecture Hall, on a report of possible graffiti on a chalkboard. As we walked the halls, Parks recalled some of the low points of the job. Like deaths. He remembers one story where police had once arrived at the Lecture Hall to help a woman who had collapsed on the floor. They weren’t sure how long she’d been there.
“We had to give her CPR before Harpur’s Ferry arrived,” Parks said. “Anyway, they finally arrived, only to pronounce her …”
Parks’ voice trailed off. He looked straight ahead.
“That’s never easy,” he said.
Looking for excitement, the officer took this reporter on a patrol through College-in-the-Woods’s Onondoga Hall.
According to Parks, students get a little nervous when they see a police officer patrolling their halls.
“Everybody disappears,” he said. “You’re almost invisible.”
He was right. Some residents cracked jokes, like telling the officer to arrest their friends, or yelling out “Watchya gonna do when they come for you?” Others gave an anxious glance, hunched over and quickly walked out of sight.
We sniffed around, in case anyone was smoking marijuana. Nope, no marijuana odor. Just the smell of Axe body spray and cooked hamburgers.
At around 1:20 a.m. we parked the car near the Dickinson and Newing cutouts. Two hours ago partygoers nimbly loaded cabs for a night out. Now they clumsily unloaded and stumbled to their dorms.
Parks was keeping an eye out for any speeding cars and for disputes between passengers and cab drivers. And as always, he was looking out for safety.
“You see that?” Parks pointed to a girl in pink pajamas walking along the Brain. Her hood was up and she was talking on a cell phone. “Does she look aware?”
Parks was concerned that she be aware of her surroundings in case a creep jumps out of the shadows and attacks her, he said.
Because for Parks, there’s more to the job than being just a police officer.
“I kind of consider myself a surrogate father,” he said.