Maureen Rush: Police will keep up the fight

While the University administration and Division of Public Safety can do little to stop the recent surge in gun violence in the city of Philadelphia -- and indeed neither can similar groups in large cities throughout the nation -- we are taking every possible action to keep this violence from impacting the Penn community.

When our crime mapping data revealed a patterned increase in activity last spring, the University Administration increased the Division of Public Safety's budget by $1 million for a total operating and capital budget of $24 million -- one of the highest in the nation.

This enabled the Division to hire dozens of additional Allied security officers to patrol on- and off-campus, supplementing our existing contingency of 101 Penn Police officers, who have full arrest and investigatory powers under the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, more than 300 Allied Security Officers and the Philadelphia Police officers who also patrol our area.

On Nov. 22nd, the University Police Department, in coordination with our partners in the Philadelphia Police Department, launched a tactical Task Force that has strategically deployed overt and covert officers to targeted areas.

This tactic has been effective in that Penn and Philadelphia police have since arrested more than 88 perpetrators of various crimes within the Penn patrol boundary and the surrounding buffer zone, lowering the overall crime rate in December by 16 percent and dispersing the activity that penetrated our boundaries last semester back outside of our area.

The entire University community is engaged on some level:

n Several University Divisions and local businesses have worked with us to install additional CCTV cameras and to add pedestrian lighting on- and off- campus.

Working with PECO, we just completed phase one of a three-pronged lighting project to install additional pedestrian lighting lining the streets west of 40th Street between Market Street and Baltimore Avenue.

n Business Services has worked with us to find ways to enhance transit options.

n Students are hearing our message and taking advantage of the safety services available to them such as walking (215.898.WALK) and riding (215.898.RIDE) escort services. Last December, use of the walking escort service increased by 250 percent over 2004.

n Academics who are leaders in their fields of criminology and sociology are conducting research that will yield tactical recommendations for forecasting and identifying future crime trends that may target the local community.

n A University City consortium consisting of representatives from Penn's Division of Public Safety, Drexel, University of the Sciences, SEPTA, Philadelphia Police, the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, University City Safety Ambassadors, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Probation and Parole Board and many others meet several times a month to proactively identify crime trends and implement solutions.

We will continue to fight in full force out on the streets to arrest perpetrators and deter crime in our community.

We need everyone in the Penn community to join us in the fight by taking advantage of safety services, reporting suspicious activity and making wise decisions so that the level of safety and security that we worked so hard to achieve over the past ten years is restored.

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