Murder in College Park, MD: The Tipping Point
To continue with the childhood connection to my planning career, I’ve also always had an deep interest in law enforcement, which may in fact be in my blood, considering that my maternal grandfather and two uncles were police officers. Of course, with the exception of the classical fantasies that kids have about future professions, I never wanted to actually serve within the front lines of law enforcement, although I still occasionally daydream about being a detective and solving cases.
Just like in the present day, as the years progressed, my interest in the subject had always been much more academic, i.e. theories behind policing, penology, the justice system, the criminal mind, and crime prevention strategies. In fact, as an undergraduate, I was just six credits short of adding another major, Criminology and Criminal Justice, to my diploma. But, as a graduate student, I created a concentration for myself in Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)—more on that later.
So, you may be asking, this is a blog about planning, and not law enforcement, so where is the connection between the two?
Turns out, there is a direct interplay, and this will be explained much throughout this blog.
For now, I’ll explain how I put the two together.
I graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), the flagship institution of the University of Maryland System, in May 2002. College Park is a city in Prince George’s County located only about 5 minutes from the District of Columbia. In fact, Route 1, which is a major thoroughfare into DC, cuts directly through College Park and serves as the major commercial corridor for students and residents alike.
The UMCP campus, which consists of hundreds of acres and contains such diverse uses ranging from a mini farm to a nuclear reactor, is completely contained—that is, the vast majority of the campus does not spread through city neighborhoods. And, it is well known for its sports, most notably (or perhaps notoriously) the basketball team’s 2002 NCAA National Championship.
Although not on the same aesthetic and “fun” level as classic college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan (The University of Michigan), Charlottesville, Virginia (The University of Virginia), or Chapel Hill, North Carolina (The University of North Caroline), College Park is an archetypal college town, with a small—yet vibrant, attractive, and pedestrian-friendly—downtown, packed with bars, restaurants, delis, takeout restaurants, specialty shops, national chains, and a standard of all college towns, an over-sized bookstore.
Beyond the downtown, the Route 1 corridor extends to both the north and south, with the northern portion of the city along Route 1 characterized by a mixture of land uses, varying from auto body shops on small lots to sprawling shopping centers. As you drive through the northern portion of Route 1 to reach the downtown, you instantly notice the land use differences, as it’s generally urban sprawl vs. pedestrian-friendly mixed-use.
The vast majority of the city’s visitors, however, are not interested in the northern portion of Route 1; the target begins just as you pass by the campus’ first entrance off Route 1 south.
It is not without surprise that, with all College Park has to offer, the city is a magnet for those seeking a good time, whether it be drinking at one of the bars, enjoying a meal, or watching a basketball game at the Comcast Center. While the DC Metro area has a number of destinations, it is widely known, especially amongst the college age cohort, that College Park, with countless “open door policy” parties, is the place to be on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday nights.
With parties comes intoxication, and intoxication leads to vulnerability. Even without the inebriation factor, a packed college party is almost always a volatile environment—ripe for confrontation.
During my tenure there, from August 1998 through September 2002, crime had always been a fact of life. Without fail, The Diamondback, the daily student newspaper, reported accounts of theft, robberies, assaults, or sexual assaults on a weekly basis. Certainly, any campus, with its concentrations of young people, has its share of criminal activity; college students are just easy targets, but in College Park, it seemed, during my tenure, everyone knew of someone who had been victimized
Incidentally, beyond providing an overview of College Park student life, I am not going to explain why, in my opinion, crime levels were unusually high in College Park until the next blog post.
Students, police, residents, and local politicians had always “accepted” crime as an unfortunate fact of life.
However, that all changed shortly after I graduated in May 2002.
During Homecoming 2002, Brandon Malstrom, a UMCP student, was stabbed and killed at an off-campus party. Student deaths, while rare, do occasionally occur, as did three in my last year (one from an overdose, and the other two due to a tornado). A student murder, on the other hand, is beyond rare. It strikes fear into every student, and perhaps even more so the parents.
This event served as the tipping point, with intense media attention and pressure on the city, county police force, and the university administration to assuage the fears and devise a solution to a constantly simmering problem.
Clearly, law enforcement is not a panacea for all of society’s ills, but it does share in the overall responsibility to work with the community and act creatively to combat crime. Moreover, the city, its residents, and the university all are stakeholders and have an incentive to ensure a safe community. Without community consensus and action, problems tend to continue and exacerbate, ultimately reaching a critical breaking point, as it did with the Malstrom murder.
Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it?
While it does, its simplicity belies the reality of human nature: people are naturally protective of their flock, and any interference is tantamount to a threat against natural order. Coalition naturally form as a reaction to a need to work together, not out of desire, but merely necessity. With the murder, all College Park stakeholders had no choice but to work collectively.
Although I had graduated months earlier, I was still reading the online version of The Diamondback, and I was immensely interested in following this story. Having such a personal connection to College Park, I began to think critically about why this happened and how the ongoing crime problem could be mitigated. Surely, I thought, police saturation was helpful, but unsustainable and politically adverse. Where the students going to stop partying? Absolutely not, so the “targets” would continue to exist.
Then, I began thinking that perhaps the most effective method was to institute additional safety programs (beyond the rarely used “Call A Ride”), or maybe even go as far as altering the built environment in such a way to reduce the likelihood of criminal activity, a consideration probably due to my urban planning studies at the time.
With all stakeholders finally working together (or, at least the appearance of it occurring), the potential for change was bright, and the leaders most certainly had a mandate to devise solutions.
The crime problem had reached its tipping point, so the environment was ripe for innovative ideas, beyond just law enforcement tackling the problem solo….
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