Students concerned with threats by frustrated residents to videotape unruly students have presented Campaign Georgetown, a grassroots student organization, with an opportunity to resume the student advocacy that spawned the organization’s creation in 1996.

Matthew Ingham (COL ’04), co-chair of Campaign Georgetown, said that his organization realizes that the filming of students in public areas is legal and that misbehaving students should be punished for their actions.

He said he believes, however, that any videotaping will be divisive and unproductive to town-gown relations.

“To think the present proposal is solely about holding individual students responsible for their actions is simply naive, for the implications of the proposal are substantially larger,” Ingham said. “Our most salient fear is that the videotapes will be used to present an unrepresentative picture of the student body to the press, public and city government.”

Eric Lashner (COL ’05), also co-chair of Campaign Georgetown, first heard about plans to videotape students at an Alliance for Local Living (ALL) meeting, a group in which he is a member.

Though he said he did not attend the meeting, Lashner said he was disappointed to learn that residents were supposedly “excited” when members of the Citizens Association of Georgetown encouraged videotaping students.

“The residents do have valid concerns but it’s so difficult to target the few causing the problems without harming the rights of the majority of people who have good relations with their neighbors,” he said.

Georgetown resident Tim Downs attended the ALL meeting where the proposal was introduced and said he strongly supports videotaping. Downs said that any public behavior caught on tape could and should be turned over to the media and police because any behavior in public is fair game. He also cautioned that such taping was not necessarily targeting students, but rowdy behavior in general.

“As I understood, the videotaping was to be of disruptive and destructive behavior, not of students,” he said. “I believe that videotape is a marvelous tool to protect those that are not engaged in that type of behavior. My interest is that those people do not get any of the blowback.”

Campaign Georgetown launched a Web site last Tuesday and over 200 students have visited since. On the site, students are able to send e-mails to CAG President Ray Kukulski asking him to withdraw the proposal.

Ingham, Lashner and GUSA President Brian Morgenstern (COL ’05), sent out an e-mail last night encouraging students to visit the website and voice their support. They wrote, “While we must do our part to better relations with our neighbors beyond Healy Gates, we must also respond to community leadership when our rights are infringed.”

Both Ingham and Lashner are optimistic about an improvement in community relations provided that plans to videotape students do not go forward. They cited such groups as ALL, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission and the Student Neighborhood Assistance Program (SNAP) as alternatives for positive change.

SNAP enables residents to call in complaints about students to the university-staffed hotline instead of calling the Metropolitan Police Department.

Bill Skelsey, a Commissioner on the ANC, believes that students should attend local community meetings in order to have their voices heard and prevent potential conflicts.

“Since being elected I have been trying to find better ways to connect with all my constituents, especially students who lead such busy lives, so that I can do a better job representing them,” Skelsey said. “I think that anyone, even a student, would get great satisfaction from working to make a better community.”

Georgetown residents met at St. John’s Episcopal Church last Wednesday for a Partnerships for Problem Solving meeting with representatives of MPD to discuss how to resolve student noise and trash problems in the neighborhood.

D.C. City Council Jack Evans (Ward-2) and MPD officers have repeatedly reminded students and residents alike that videotaping unruly behavior by anyone on public streets is legal and permissible.

“Anyone who engages themselves in illegal activities is opening themselves up to blackmail,” Downs added.

The recent discussions of public videotaping of unruly students follows similar attempts by residents in Northeast Washington and College Park, Md., to tape students at Catholic University and the University of Maryland, respectively, in 1999.

Campaign Georgetown was initially formed in 1996 to protest a housing overlay that would limit the amount of unrelated individuals who could live in a house from six to three.

The organization mobilized students in Fall 2002 when three students, including Lashner, ran for seats on the Advisory Neighborhood Commission. Two student candidates lost, and Mike Glick (COL ’05) won the sole student seat on the commission as a write-in candidate.

Since then, Campaign Georgetown has maintained a lower profile on campus, organizing responses to actions by the Board of Zoning Adjustment that could have an adverse effect on the university’s 10-year plan, prohibitions about parking and students’ rights to vote.