 "Photo: Paul Chouy; The Daily Texan")
“I’m peeing in your closet,” said the student to the Blanton Dormitory residents he had awoken on a drunken summer night in 2002. “I’ll be back tomorrow to clean the closet.”
The identity of that student is known only to the UT Police Department, whose officers cited him for criminal mischief a short time later.
But his deed, along with hundreds of others equally amusing, is immortalized in Campus Watch, the department’s daily report of every reported crime — large or small, ingenious or ignominious — in the University area.
“You hear of Campus Watch and you say it’s going to be dry and it’s lame and all that good stuff,” says Officer Darrell Halstead, who, with fellow crime prevention Officer William Pieper, writes the online report every morning.
Campus Watch could be dry — it’s essentially a compilation of UTPD incident reports from the previous day — but thanks to the folly of youth and Halstead and Pieper’s eye for humor, it is often hilarious.
At its best, Campus Watch can transform a 50-word offense report into something approaching a folktale.
In April, Campus Watch told of a UTPD officer who came across a group of drunken students throwing rocks into the Tower Garden’s turtle pond. According to the report, the officer “learned that one subject had gotten stuck in the middle of the pond and his friends were building a rock bridge so that he could walk out of the pond.”
Many of the student body’s finest moments are recorded in Campus Watch’s archives, which date back to 2001. There’s the report about the students who stole the bases, literally, from UFCU Disch-Falk Field, or the one about the student caught in a Jester dining hall with a drinking cup full of stolen chicken.
Pieper and Halstead distill even mundane incidents down to their most entertaining details: One report describes a drunk student at a football game with his head “nestled against the hind quarters of the football patron who was standing in front of him.”
Kidding around in their swivel chairs amid the rock crystals, stickers and toys that adorn their office, Halstead and Pieper sometimes seem like they’d fit in better at the back of a freshman lecture hall than at UTPD headquarters.
But both men — hulking figures who stand over 6 feet tall — are unmistakably cops. Their combined 37 years in the UTPD are evident in the .50-caliber bullets Pieper keeps on his desk as “a conversation piece” and the bulletproof vest Halstead casually straps on at the end of a nine-hour day as he prepares for patrol duty.
“It’s all about prevention,” Pieper says. And for him and Halstead, it really is.
Behind the offbeat details and gentle mockery in Campus Watch, its authors’ ultimate goal is to inform as many students as possible about campus crimes so they can protect themselves.
The two men are natural jokers, but they use their humor strategically, trying to draw an audience to what would otherwise be a banal police report.
Their efforts have earned Campus Watch 9,500 e-mail subscribers and a small cult following online, with fan pages on Facebook and LiveJournal. Some of its reports, such as one from 2006 detailing a squirrel that mutilated a bicycle seat, have made national news, Halstead says.
“A lot of blotters and police blogs just state the facts,” Pieper says. “They’re rather bland. People don’t read them. We find if we give some funny details about a crime, people tend to read it. Then we can sneak in some crime prevention tips.”
They don’t always sneak the tips in. In January, the report urged students to make New Year’s safety resolutions and pledge to “keep the interior of [their] car free of all personal items” and “better understand the risks of consuming too much alcohol” — not exactly side-splitters, but the sort of safety lessons that Pieper and Halstead want to impress on their readers as they entertain them.
“We try to use Campus Watch as a tool to inform you so you can make reasonable decisions,” Halstead says. “Bill and I can’t forcibly take someone by the nose and make them change.”
“Well, we could,” Pieper says. “But it would be illegal.”
He’s joking.
Campus Watch can be read at utexas.edu/police/campuswatch.
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