Have you ever received a letter from the DU Office of Community Standards? It’s the letter regarding documented incidents. It seems that most everyone has received such a letter for one reason or another – noise, failure to comply with a regulation or even alcohol use. The letter could be floor documentations filed by RAs in the dorms.Every time students leave something lying out in the hall or something that causes damage to the floor they face “documentation” that will result in a floor charge for everyone on the floor if the perpetrator is not found. Sound a little too general? That’s what I thought when I saw floor charges being levied a bit too frequently.Trash in the laundry rooms, posters being ripped off the walls, a random trash can in the hall, all result in charges.But who is responsible for all these infractions?Under the present systems, those who live on a floor are the ones who have to shell out money for the repairs or the fines. What if the students didn’t do anything wrong?Considering the number of noise and alcohol violations, isn’t it plausible that some random person – not a resident of that particular floor – came into the hall late at night or early in the morning and created the havoc?Floors charged raise funds for repair of damage caused by students. That seems fair enough.Unfortunately, charges are imposed very broadly and, inevitably, force innocent students to pay fines when they haven’t done anything wrong.The $25 charge for dumping trash in the halls may not seem like a lot when evenly distributed among floor occupants, but realize that those charges do compound into one final charge. Some people may have parents that will divvy out money to pay for those accumulated fines but other parents won’t be as generous. Maybe the system needs to be changed so it is a little more liberal in how charges are levied on floor members. Maybe people need to realize how much money they are actually going to be paying at the end of the school year for leaving around a trash can. The system of indiscriminately levied fines hurts a lot of innocent, neat and law-abiding students. There’s got to be a better way.