<p>There is not much debate about Sandusky because pretty much everyone agrees about him. If he did the horrible things he is accused of he should go straight to prison and from there straight to hell.</p>
<p>By contrast, Paterno gets discussed endlessly because he is viewed in two rather different ways. One side sees him as a saint who did everything he was supposed to do but was still unfairly fired and then cruelly hounded into an early death. The other side sees him as the guy at the top of the football program who, when faced with an extraordinary mess, chose to live up to only the barest definition of his responsibilities and thus tacitly allowed the horrible suffering of innocents to continue for years. </p>
<p>You can see why these two positions might lead to lengthy arguments.</p>
<p>JustAMomof4, there’s no need to exaggerate Paterno’s notable football accomplishments. I think your comment about Paterno improving the lives of ‘many from the inner city’ is overstating the case. I think it has been known in college football (from Paterno’s own statements) that PSU typically declined to recruit in such areas, and usually had strict standards for the ocassional exception to the rule. If you’re talking about African-American athletes, Paterno preferred players such as Curt Warner, the great PSU running back from rural West Virginia. Yes, probably there are PSU football alumni from “inner city areas” whom have what we think of as stereotypical inner city backgrounds…but as opposed to other big-time NCAA programs, there never have been many such athletes at PSU, as far as I can tell.</p>
<p>Agree with 4142 above. 4142 already on this topic - yikes! Sandusky is very likely an evil man. Paterno did not do all within his power to stop Sandusky from perpetrating evil while otherwise running a successful and relatively clean major football program and giving much of his heart and money to Penn State. Clearly, there are differing perspectives on how posterity should judge him. Isn’t that about the gist of it?</p>
<p>Justamom, are you deliberately choosing ton ignore the fact that paterno did a lot for second mile, that he allowed Sandusky to bring little boys to games and practices? If he didn’t like m, gee he coulda shoulda said go away.</p>
<p>He was a coach. They named buildings after him and put up statues. </p>
<p>I meant the real police, not the campus cops who on every campus I’ve ever been on are little more than a bad joke, without the capacity to do a real felony investigation. Tell me this, how many detectives does the Penn State campus police force have? Their web site doesn’t mention any. It does mention 46 armed officers, 6 traffic and parking officers, 5 dispatchers, and 200 student auxiliaries and escorts. These are the people who write campus parking tickets, patrol around campus in squad cars, direct traffic before and after football games, shut down parties that get out of control, and write out a report if your bicycle or laptop is stolen, which is helpful in recovering from your insurer. This is not a serious felony investigation force.</p>
<p>I don’t know anything about the State College police, but at least they have a Detectives Division, with a real live Assistant Chief/Captain of Detectives reporting directly to the Chief of Police, and a Lieutenant of Detectives reporting to the Captain, and a Sergeant of Detectives reporting to the Lieutenant, and below that, some real live detectives. So at least on paper they have the capacity to investigate when they get an eyewitness report of a felony being committed.</p>
<p>Why would you go to the campus cops instead of the town police department in a case like this? Well, to keep it in-house. And to be candid about it, that’s one of the main reasons colleges and universities have their own police forces: to keep a lot of infractions that would be treated as criminal matters by the local police in-house, where they can be dealt with through disciplinary policies and procedures internal to the school so Junior doesn’t come out the other end with a criminal conviction record. That, plus the local community doesn’t want to pay to police the campus, and the college doesn’t want to pay the community what it would cost for the regular police force to police the campus, so the college hires its own cut-rate police officers, often with less training than professional police officers, and in many cases non-unionized so the school doesn’t need to pay the more generous salaries and benefits that unionized municipal police officers command. So you can well predict where most of the best trained, most skilled, and most experienced cops are going to end up. (Hint: it’s not writing endless reports on stolen bicycles on a college campus).</p>
<p>bc- this is a mistake people keep making. The Penn St University police are the real police. For crimes that happen on campus the police from the town of State College do not have jurisdiction.</p>
<p>Here is from Harvard-What’s the difference between the HUPD and the city police, like Cambridge, Boston Police, etc.?
The only difference is jurisdiction. HUPD officers are licensed special State Police officers and deputy sheriffs in both Middlesex and Suffolk Counties. Those powers give them the authority to respond to any crime on our campus and any “breach of the peace” on city streets in Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston. Officers receive the same academy training as officers from Cambridge. </p>
<p>^^ right, the campus police are the real police. However, I do believe that it was determined earlier in the thread that PA’s report law names an agency other than the police that abuse must be reported to. What I do not remember is if the law was in place at the time Paterno should have reported the abuse. I seem to remember some question as to whether or not that law was on the books yet. </p>
<p>I also thought that Schultz was the admin head of the police department on the campus, but not actually a police officer himself. Is that correct?</p>
<p>I think child assualt was a bit beyond their expertise as we have all seen.</p>
<p>Hey guys one of our own has been accused of possibly raping a minor on our campus, think we ought to bring in someone else? Police departments have people trained to deal with these very sensitive issues and as witnessed here, the Penn state police did one awful job dealing with this.</p>
<p>So while they were quote in charge unquote, they should have asked for outside help. As there are relatively few minors on campuses and child rapes would hopefully be rare, indent imagine the police on campuses have special training to deal with these issues. </p>
<p>These men knew exactly what they were doing when they reported ton their buddy. Nothing.</p>
<p>Somebody refresh my memory. If I remember it correctly, there was no record of a police report after the 2002 incident. If it is claimed that Paterno or Spanier reported it to the police, campus or otherwise, wouldn’t there be a report? If the campus police is the “actual” police department; one and the same with State College police, wouldn’t there be a report?</p>
<p>EPTR- Schultz was the head of the campus police. Both McQuery and Paterno know he was told of the incident. He appears not to have followed up. He says it is because he was not told of a crime. The DA disagrees and has charged him with perjury. That does not mean the both McQuery and Paterno would not see making Schultz aware of the incident reporting it to the police.</p>
<p>Sea- if they took the charge to the State College police they would have been referred to the University police. Also Schultz testified that he believed Child Protective Services was notified. At this time we do not know if he told other people that same story.</p>
<p>If you are assaulted in a sleepy suburb of NYC would NYC handle the investigation because their police force is more highly trained or would they tell you to report to the police where the crime occurred?</p>
<p>The issue to me is not that errors were made- clearly there were errors- the issue to me is that many here claim that there was a cover up to protect football. I do not see any proof of that.</p>
<p>I doubt that there was an organized cover-up with secret meetings to discuss how to suppress evidence and silence witnesses. But given how central football and Paterno were to the institutional identity of Penn State, the lack of follow-up back in 2002 begins to looks a little suspicious. More like a passive, de facto equivalent of a cover-up rather than an active, deliberate cover-up.</p>
<p>It begins to look like several people, including and especially Paterno, probably didn’t follow-up anywhere near as aggressively as circumstances required - and at the same time were very likely hoping that the whole thing would somehow blow over, or turn out to be nothing, or be dealt with quietly, or otherwise go away so that it wouldn’t blow up into a public scandal that damaged the revered football program.</p>
<p>Does anyone think for a second that this would have unfolded the same way if Sandusky had been a coach of any sport at Penn State other than football? If he had been say a fencing or lacrosse coach and got spotted doing the same things, he would have been in handcuffs so fast he wouldn’t have had time to even put his pants back on. </p>
<p>I think fear of damaging the football program very likely did indeed slow the hand of anyone contemplating taking aggressive action back in 2002. And boy were they right to worry. When it finally did blow up we did indeed get a huge scandal that has damaged the football program.</p>
<p>^^No, but he was still strongly associated with the football program and still was granted access to the school and its athletic facilities. Anyone who thought about it for two seconds would correctly guess that if Sandusky got caught raping boys in the shower that it would have negative fallout for the football program.</p>
<p>The fact that Sandusky’s actions back then have blown up in the face of the football program in 2011 and 2012 amply demonstrates that it would have done so then too, regardless of whether he was still a coach.</p>
<p>Tom, then what is your take of the whole episode? Was it just an innocent mistake or just lazy uninspired administrators that could not see potential problem from the several warnings and incidences (1998 and 2002)?</p>
<p>of course… but my mistakes do not result in other people’s lives being ruined forever. My mistakes result in things like a less than stellar grade on an exam.</p>
<p>True enough, and that’s Paterno’s main failing in all this - that he did the mere minimum and took no action to follow-up and make sure it got properly investigated. He was content to not to rock the boat or ask too many questions and to let others take care of it. He could have sounded the alarm and pushed the school, the press, and the police to vigorously pursue this matter. But of course that big outcry and investigation would have created a scandal and reflected badly on the football program. </p>
<p>And that’s why Paterno has been damaged himself - this failure-to-investgate can be seen as partially his fault.</p>
<p>It could have been that tt plus some type of cover up. There were at least 6 people involved and everyone of them could have had a different motivation.
It also could be that Sandusky fooled some of them and they could not take the leap and see him as a predator. </p>
<p>coureur - you may be correct that Paterno did not follow up and I would agree that he did not follow up adequately enough in hindsight. I just am not sure yet if we know what follow up he might have done. We do know he said he backed off to avoid the appearance that he was exerting influence.</p>