Don’t Make College Kids the Coronavirus Police

...In addition to agreeing to conduct themselves according to these rules, students are also being asked to police one another for violating them. College campuses have long monitored their students’ behavior to enforce various expectations, from attending class to completing assigned readings to sticking around at football games. In the age of Covid-19, these forms of monitoring are intensifying — and students are being tasked with becoming surveillors themselves.

...Another risk is that peer reporting systems may have unintended consequences — especially when people use them for their own purposes. Consider the VOICE hotline run early in the Trump administration, ostensibly for the reporting of information about crimes committed by individuals with “a nexus to immigration.”

People who called VOICE were motivated by a wide variety of family, neighborhood and business disputes. One caller reported a family member who would not let her see her granddaughter. Another reported his wife, who he said was falsely accusing him of domestic violence in order to obtain legal residency. Still others targeted spouses who had committed adultery or abused their children. Another reported an employee of her ballroom dance studio, who was allegedly trying to lure away customers to her own competing studio.

People report on one another (truthfully or falsely) for a number of personal reasons, including competition, revenge, leverage and everyday aggravations. There’s every reason to assume that these motivations will bubble up in the college context, too. Students have their own loyalties, broken hearts, rocky roommate relationships and fraternity codes of silence....

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Don’t Make College Kids the Coronavirus Police

CRAZY_CAT_WOMAN said:

Not if it dangers your life.

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Imagine if you adhere to the Covid-19 protocols strictly. Someone who does not like you reports to the police that you have coronavirus and is exposing the population to this. The police comes to your home and detains you based on this, and puts you in quarantine against your will. You keep telling them you do not have Covid-19 but they do not listen at first. They however decided to test you for coronavirus, but the results do not come through quickly because there is a backlog. While in quarantine you get coronavirus from another person who is also in quarantine, you end up getting very sick from this. This is what can happen to an innocent person.