New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has advised female college students who claim to have been sexually assaulted to contact real, actual police.
“If someone gets shot on a campus, that is not an academic matter,” Cuomo said on Wednesday, according to The Syracuse Post-Standard. “You would call the police.”
The Democratic governor said rapes and other sexual assaults are similarly serious criminal matters and should be handled by police.
“It is not a campus matter,” Cuomo explained. Students “have a right to go to law enforcement.”
The governor observed that campus police officers and university bureaucrats are very poorly equipped to handle rape and sexual assault complaints compared to real police with a full complement of arrest and investigative powers.
Cuomo made his profoundly matter-of-fact and commonsensical statements in Albany on Wednesday during a cabinet meeting. He was promoting an “Enough is Enough” campaign, which seeks to reduce incidences of rape and sexual assault on college campuses.
The Democrat has also proposed a bill that would require private colleges and universities across the state to adopt a sexual assault policy recently adopted by New York’s 64 taxpayer-funded college campuses.
The state-school policy requires students to obtain “affirmative consent” for sexual activity and pardons students who are drunk or on drugs if they call the police to report a sex crime.
New York also now has a 24-hour hotline (844-845-7269) through which students at both public and private schools can report sex assaults and rapes.
Rape and sexual assault have been in the campus spotlight in recent years, ever since the Obama administration’s Department of Education created a complex new policy dictating how American colleges and universities must respond to allegation of sexual violence. The policy depends very heavily — at times exclusively — on Title IX, a comprehensive 1972 federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. (RELATED: How Obama Bureaucrats Are Aiming To Deny Students Constitutional Due Process)
The movement to force college administrators to investigate rape and punish rapists suffered a serious blow late last year after disgraced journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely asserted in a now-debunked story in Rolling Stone that at least five members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia gang-raped a freshman named Jackie at a party, then left her in a bloodstained dress to exit via a conveniently vacant side staircase.
A subsequent investigation by The Daily Caller demonstrated that the number of completely fraudulent rape allegations made by women on American college campuses is far from trivial. (RELATED: Here Are EIGHT Campus Rape Hoaxes Eerily Like The UVA Rape Story)
Follow Eric on Twitter. Like Eric on Facebook. Send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.