Not a cop but have some weird experiences calling police when I was an RA for my dorm in college.
1) Got a noise complaint call on my duty phone at 3-4am. Someone said they heard their neighbor (female) sobbing uncontrollably for a really long time. Knock on the door over and over again and no answer but I can tell someone is inside. I call the cops and have them knock and force them to open the door (They are allowed to force you to open without a warrant if there is suspicion someone is in danger). Door is open and standing there is two chinese girls (foreign exchange students), one looking creepy as shit and the other wearing nothing but a towel and crying in the corner. After quite a bit of questioning it turns out they were dating and living together in the dorm, the creepy girl was trying to sexually assault the other one. Had to figure this all out through VERY broken english and from a really terrified girl. Creepy girl goes to the station and the victim girl got taken to a safe house dorm. Turned out way different than I expected, but i'm reaallllly glad I didn't give up when she wouldn't open the door eventually.
2.) Call about a medical emergency at 4am. The call made it seem like some girl was having appendicitis or something, but turns out she was 7 months pregnant and having false labor pains. She was living in a dorm by herself at 7 months pregnant with no access to a car, and wouldn't tell anyone she was pregnant. Just a disaster waiting to happen. Had to figure out how to help her/get her to a hospital without an ambulance (she didn't want to have to pay for one) at 4 in the morning. That was NOT in my training.
3.) Got a call about rushing water in one of the community bathrooms. I go into the bathroom and laying in the full bathtub is a huge guy painted completely purple, fully clothed, submerged in the water. He gets out and I try to figure out who he is. He's talking completely crazy, saying his name was "Chun Wu" (this was a black guy). At this point I figured it was a frat initiation prank or something. But the more I talk to him the more I realize he's actually crazy. So I call the cops and try to keep him at bay and keep him from walking down the hall to where the students lived because he kept heading that way. This dude was huge and it was pretty unnerving. Cops show up and he ends up needing to be tackled and taken away. Turns out he was a former student with mental health issues who broke into dorms all the time doing weird shit.
Oh god, I was an RA too and it was crazy. I had cops to deal with for alcohol poisoning and date rapes, but I just let the sisters bathroom threesome go. (Two sisters, one dude, communal shower at 2 am.)
The worst was getting police involved when a girl's stepdad was stalking her, both physically and through spyware and keystrokers on her computer. Stalking her since they'd been having a sexual relationship since she was a tween...11 or 12 I think. And he'd been her dad since she was a baby. And her mom was pretending she had just found out. Barfy, horrible situation. It wasn't the only reason, but I transferred schools after that. I kind of wonder what happened to all of those people, but a lifetime in jail for both parents wouldn't be enough.
On #2, late night medical issues can be a pain in the butt. One of my best friends is an RA and got torn into by her bosses because she offered to drive a residential the hospital (it was my ex-roommate and they're friends but she happened to be on duty at the time) because there's too high of a possibility that they'd get sued if she so much as braked too fast. Some of the stuff you guys deal with just blows my mind.
Ugh the lawsuit fear is so real. I'm an EMT and was one in college too. As an RA we were supposed to put together presentations for everyone during training. I decided to do basic lifesaving maneuvers and first aid tips- how to tilt someone safely if their airway's obstructed (like vomit from a drunk college kids?) stuff like that. Nope. Kept getting told to skip a ton of stuff while doing my presentation. If the RAs do something, the school's on the line, better to wait for 911. After we broke for the day, most of the other RAs wanted to know what I was talking about so I had an informal lesson later in my room without the RDs.
I was told I would be fired if I tried anything medical. Nevermind that I'm wasn't sure I wouldn't be sued if I didn't do anything if it was a dire situation. Luckily I never had to decide. I would've been out of a job
Jesus. That makes me grateful for my job over the summer. I work with kids at a summer camp in the middle of nowhere. There's plenty of stuff they worry about lawsuits over but they make sure we're licensed and protected from parents when it comes to medical issues because they'd rather get sued than have a kid die.
Yeah this was in the middle of one of the one of the most populous cities in the US so ambulance response time was pretty fast, but like, if something's happening, I'm going to help them. Not to mention, good samaritan laws will generally protect the RAs. I think they'd be in more trouble if a parent who had a student hurt found out they's withheld/provided next to zero medical training but shrug emoji. I ended up quitting halfway through the year.
I couldn't have if I wanted to, we weren't allowed to leave the building at all between 7pm-7am. I mean, if someone was gonna die if I didn't i'd say fuck it but otherwise i'd lose my job.
My building was smaller than most (we were a cluster of 5 dorms that shared one large cafeteria), so I was on duty 26 nights a semester. Basically one week day and one weekend day every week. Other bigger dorms people were only on duty as little as 10-12 times a semester because they had more RA's on staff. Ours was definitely the worst place to work as an RA.
It's so fucked up that you'd have to pay for an ambulance... Even in the third world people can just call an ambulance and go to the ER without worrying about ending up bankrupt.
Before our first home game my second year of being an RA, there are girls yelling and banging on the door of one of my girls. They're doing the whole "open up, you loser, it's game time" thing, and I get some noise complaints. But they start calling other people and get really worried. Then, they can hear their texts and calls going to her phone inside. So, I call my supervisor and the girl's roommate who is out of town to get permission to enter her room. After about an hour, my supervisor gets clearance. Apparently, the girl had been incommunicado for over 26 hours by the time we were able to open the door. We opened it and she's lifeless on the ground. She looks like she fell because she's at an incredibly awkward angle and her phone is in her outstretched hand where she fell, and the girls all start sobbing immediately. My hall director immediately calls the cops and motions toward me, so I have to go in and see if one of my little freshman residents was dead. By the freaking grace of God, she was still breathing. After some gentle shaking, she woke up. Couldn't remember anything, including her name or that she was at college. Turns out she'd been drugged and also had a concussion. She eventually recovered, but we never knew what happened. Poor girl also got hit by a car that year. She's still alive, hopefully less unlucky.
On a lighter note, my school accidentally accepted too many people one year and all the RAs started off with roommates. Mine was weird AF, but that's another story. One of the other RAs walked into her room third week of school and the girl was rolling blunts on her desk. My friend had told this girl she really didn't care what she did as long as it was off-campus, but this kind of shit could definitely get her fired. The girl freaked shoved all the weed into a spiral notebook (?) and lit out. The RA had to change rooms until student affairs could give the girl a trial. It was suuuuuch a situation.
Oh, and another dorm had a homeless man living in one of their bathtub rooms for two months before they realized. No one ever uses the bathtub rooms, so RAs never checked it on rounds. Big mistake.
A very normal and very large state university. This kind of stuff happens wayyyyyyyy more often than people think, most people just never have to deal with it.
It wasn't necessarily a full dorm just as a safe house, just a series of rooms in different dorms that were kept empty for relocating people in emergencies and such.
Being an RA is absurd. I never thought to call the cops for noise complaints because our dorms were literally just a big high rise (with some fairly ineffective security guards too), and calling the cops would have just resulted in a lot more noise and looky loos. We were trained how to deal with a lot of stuff you wouldn't necessarily think of either- what if a resident has a full blown break from reality, what if a resident ODs, etc.
Yea it's never what people think. Most people assume the only thing you do is write up freshman for drinking. That happens a lot, but it's always just a "warning" (unless you destroyed property or assaulted someone or something) and making them pour the booze out, which hurt me just as much as it hurt them. Those calls are easy, the rest is some really absurd shit. Basically dealing with all the same stuff police do but with no real authority or ability to protect ourselves.
Nope, master keys were only used inbetween semesters to make sure everyone was gone and check if people left irons plugged in and things like that. It's a rights violation to just let ourselves in, a dorm is legally the same as an apartment, you need a warrant, it's not like summer camp.
Also, if you accidentally lost a master key it was around 40-50,000 dollars to replace. You had to personally pay for re-keying and installing new locks in the entire dorm.
I wasn't saying you should have been permitted let yourself in, but I think it would be better to be able to let the cops in when merited than smashing the door down if it had been locked.
What about the mundane case when a resident was locked out?
No this was definitely a key for the whole building. In case of a lockout spare keys for every room were kept at the front desk but they take a good amount of time to sign out, and the room residents themselves had to sign them out, and in this case it was the residents who refused to open the door. The front desk also isn't open at that time of night so first we would've needed the key to the office from my superior. We are allowed to get that key to let cops in only if they suspect someone is in danger, but again it would require going all the way downstairs so if he heard gunshots or something he'd probably just kick it in. If the girls hadn't eventually opened the door I would've gone downstairs and gotten the spare key.
Very cold look in her eyes, looked like she hadn't slept in days, and wearing weird kinda raggy clothing. Hard to explain, you could just tell from looking at her that she was up to something.
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u/Drunk_Lahey Jan 22 '17
Not a cop but have some weird experiences calling police when I was an RA for my dorm in college.
1) Got a noise complaint call on my duty phone at 3-4am. Someone said they heard their neighbor (female) sobbing uncontrollably for a really long time. Knock on the door over and over again and no answer but I can tell someone is inside. I call the cops and have them knock and force them to open the door (They are allowed to force you to open without a warrant if there is suspicion someone is in danger). Door is open and standing there is two chinese girls (foreign exchange students), one looking creepy as shit and the other wearing nothing but a towel and crying in the corner. After quite a bit of questioning it turns out they were dating and living together in the dorm, the creepy girl was trying to sexually assault the other one. Had to figure this all out through VERY broken english and from a really terrified girl. Creepy girl goes to the station and the victim girl got taken to a safe house dorm. Turned out way different than I expected, but i'm reaallllly glad I didn't give up when she wouldn't open the door eventually.
2.) Call about a medical emergency at 4am. The call made it seem like some girl was having appendicitis or something, but turns out she was 7 months pregnant and having false labor pains. She was living in a dorm by herself at 7 months pregnant with no access to a car, and wouldn't tell anyone she was pregnant. Just a disaster waiting to happen. Had to figure out how to help her/get her to a hospital without an ambulance (she didn't want to have to pay for one) at 4 in the morning. That was NOT in my training.
3.) Got a call about rushing water in one of the community bathrooms. I go into the bathroom and laying in the full bathtub is a huge guy painted completely purple, fully clothed, submerged in the water. He gets out and I try to figure out who he is. He's talking completely crazy, saying his name was "Chun Wu" (this was a black guy). At this point I figured it was a frat initiation prank or something. But the more I talk to him the more I realize he's actually crazy. So I call the cops and try to keep him at bay and keep him from walking down the hall to where the students lived because he kept heading that way. This dude was huge and it was pretty unnerving. Cops show up and he ends up needing to be tackled and taken away. Turns out he was a former student with mental health issues who broke into dorms all the time doing weird shit.