Last week, the Voice reported that the Department of Public Safety had been zealously enforcing a previously unknown policy of confiscating unattended laptops in Lauinger Library.

When asked about the confiscations, DPS Associate Director Joseph Smith wrote in an e-mail:

DPS routinely secures bicycles, laptops, and other items for safekeeping when they are found unattended. This is not a new policy; DPS has done this for years.

However, Smith now says the officers on the midnight shift had been performing informal “security sweeps” that were “not consistent with DPS policy.”

Smith writes in an e-mail:

I looked into this matter and found indeed that officers on the midnight shift, as an informal practice, have been securing laptops they find when they conduct a security sweep of the library and holding them at the guard desk to prevent their theft.

While I appreciate their motivation to protect the students from victimization, the practice is not consistent with DPS policy and has been ordered to be ceased immediately.  If there is a compelling need for DPS to secure any property, they will complete both an incident report and a property record, and they will secure the item at DPS headquarters.

Additional reporting by Cole Stangler.

In numbers unheard of at Georgetown, professors are banning laptop use at GWU. The Hatchet reports:

Facebook, video-chatting and instant messaging may soon be a thing of the past – at least in some GW classrooms.

A growing number of professors are banning or restricting the use of laptop computers in their classrooms in an attempt to get students to pay attention and engage in classroom discussions.

Maybe it’s just some good-old fashioned fake trend journalism—they don’t have specific numbers and write “The issue has already been addressed at other major universities across the country over the past year, including Georgetown…”—and to my knowledge, classes that ban laptop use here are not widespread.

But it may be true—and another reason to be glad you don’t go to George Washington University