With 14 cases of battery and three cases of assault on campus, the University Police Department helped shed light on what these were and how to avoid becoming a victim to them. Police Lieutenant Patrick Gipson explained that assault and battery are defined differently under Louisiana Legislature.
“The legislature defines assault as an attempt to commit a battery, and a battery is defined as the intentional touching of another person without that person’s permission,” said Gipson. “They’re two separate crimes under Louisiana law. That is different than some other states. So when you’re watching television, and they sometimes talk about assault and battery, they’re talking about a single law that involves threatening somebody and hitting them whereas in Louisiana those are two different laws.”
Louisiana state law defines assault with varying degrees.
“There are different levels, different degrees,” said Gipson. “There’s what’s called simple assault or what other states would call first-degree, where you just basically tell somebody, ‘I’m going to push you,’ or ‘I’m going to shove you,’ or ‘I’m going to hit you,’ but you don’t
actually do it. If the person making the threats is in possession of a weapon or fires a firearm at somebody but misses them, then they didn’t actually hit them. They didn’t cause injury, but they placed them in fear of being injured. So that would be an aggravated assault.”
Gipson explained that many of the battery charges on campus happened between people who already knew each other prior to the incident occurring.
Gipson explained, “Looking at the dynamics of the types of cases we handle, most of the time, assaults or batteries occur between people who know each other, and conflict resolution skills are a must. Being able to resolve disagreements without resorting to violence is very, very important.”
The UPD highly encourages those who have witnessed or become victim to assault or battery to report it to campus police.
“It may not be a major situation,” said Gipson. “Many times when people get into a fight or somebody hits somebody else or they’re pushing and shoving, very seldom are there injuries. Whether or not there were injuries, crime has still occurred, and even someone doesn’t want to press charges, most of the time they still want something done.”
Gipson explained that there are other courses of action outside of pressing charges against somebody who has committed battery or assault.
“It could be a Student Conduct issue,” said Gipson. “Other times it might just be a counseling issue where someone needs to work out some things between themselves or some type of mediation and aren’t really sure how to do that and they end up getting into a pushing match or shoving match in which case we would like for that to stop. There are other ways of dealing with conflict besides violence, so we try to help students understand that there are other ways to work out conflict.”
In some cases, it may be difficult to avoid becoming a victim of assault or battery as the blame falls upon the person threatening the victim.
“As far as a victim goes, you can’t really say, ‘Do this to stop becoming a victim,’ because you can’t really blame a victim of a crime for the crime,” said Gipson. “They’re not the ones who did something wrong. It’s the person who commits the crime and needs to be held accountable for it.”
Gipson explained that a possible solution to assault and battery rests on teaching conflict resolution skills.
“So a lot of it doesn’t fall upon the person who is being threatened,” said Gipson. “It just falls upon us as individuals, as society to understand that being angry about something is not the best time to go and try to resolve it. If taking a step back, taking a breath, thinking, ‘OK, I can disagree with somebody without being violent. I can disagree with somebody without raising my voice or swinging my arms around or getting in their face or pushing myself on them or invading their personal space.’ Those aren’t conflict resolution skills. Those are confrontational skills.”
Gipson also suggested mediation as a way to resolve possible issues between those who may resort to assault or battery.
“It may be that you need to have an intermediary,” said Gipson. “Very, very helpful in many kinds of cases where you find somebody who wasn’t involved in the confrontational or the conflict who can work with both sides and try to figure out the perspective of both sides and try to get it worked out amicably or at least down to where there’s no violence involved. That’s what we’d like to see.”