• of crime were occuring on campus, so we extended the option to [everyone]. We sent out a huge email blast every day to faculty, staff and students--honestly, that’s when I learned that spam was more than just a meat by-product, to show you how stupid I was when it came to computer language. I kept getting these emails from certain people saying, “quit spamming me,” and I had no idea what they were talking about. I responded saying, there was nothing that involved meat by-products with this, and one guy explained to me what spam was. So we quit sending out the email blast, but the last email that was blasted, we said, for those that were interested, they could sign up."
• "The subscriptions kept increasing year in and year out, but it plateaued about 2003, 2004. That’s when Bill Pieper and I started adding some humor to it. Bill came across with his country witticisms. His joke--how he typically starts his presentations--is, “Hello folks, my name’s William Robert Pieper: that’s right, I’m from Texas, my parent’s named me Billy Bob.” My sarcasm, the snark, was between the lines. You had to read it to understand it, and if you were just glancing over it, you would miss some of the hidden meaning behind the jokes."
• "A good example would be this raccoon that was over at Bridgeway. I had a captain yelling at me from down the hallway for me to get into his office right now! And he asked me, who were the officers that did not catch this guy after they had searched the building, knowing that he was still in there? I said, 'Captain, you didn’t read it very well did you? You got to about halfway through it and just quit didn’t you?' He goes, 'Yeah, why?' I say, 'Well, finish reading it.' So he re-read it, and he read all the way through, and he said, 'You’re a smartass.'
• "The orientation advisers that meet with the new freshmen, every year they have what they call "Halstead Bingo." They take those phrases, like the different OU jokes, the different A&M jokes, the different ways to describe vomiting without saying vomiting, or peeing on yourself without saying peeing on yourself, and have a little game with it during the summer to see what I come out with."
• "In 2005, we had a parent that wrote in saying, hey look, guys, you all do a great job on this Campus Watch, I don’t want somebody to get accused of a crime that they didn’t do. And she went on to tell me the story about the squirrel over at Kinsolving that had jumped on a bicycle seat and literally tore the stuffing out of the seat. She had thrown water on the squirrel, the squirrel jumped off and jumped back up to continue destroying the bicycle seat. She had written it up , and I probably got 350 or 400 emails that day asking if there was a picture. So I wrote the lady, she sent me a picture of the squirrel, and the following day I put out a BOLO, (“be on the lookout”) , and made it a very formal-sounding BOLO. You had to click on the picture to see that what we were looking for was a squirrel. And that really generated a lot of talk and dicussion about the Campus Watch. The story got picked up locally by TV news, and about a year and a half later it was picked up again in the Reader’s Digest,  under "campus humor." Which is the purpose behind the Campus Watch. It allows people to see the crimes that are occurring on campus, it allows them to see the buildings that are being affected by crime, kind of a time frame, the property that’s being stolen, how it’s being stolen.... But more importantly, adding the crime prevention tips, so you can see that if you yourself were in that situation, how you can best safeguard your own personal property, and not become a victim of a crime. It was probably one of the best crime prevention tools our department ever developed."

IT WAS MORE "META" THAN IRONIC, BUT...

My favorite entry of Jimmy Moore's tenure to date is probably  this one :

LAVACA BUILDING, 220 WEST 7TH STREET Graffiti

A UT Police Officer observed  an ironic crime, which was the word "crime" written in white spray paint  on a window at the Lavaca Building. The Graffiti was approximately ten inches by eighteen inches in size.

But Alanis Morissette-inspired laughs aside, graffiti is a topic that the Crime Prevention Unit stresses.

"A lot of people aren’t aware that graffiti on a campus is a felony, and it’s very serious," Moore told me. "And so we put that information out there to make sure they’re aware of it."

"It would be horrible to have a felony on your record because you spray-painted something while you were in college," added Layne Brewster. "People just don’t realize the seriousness of certain crimes because it is a state institution."

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