Michelle Dubert | Stopping crime isn't just the police's job

Coming home from a weekend away right before Thanksgiving break, I had three things on my mind as I jammed my key into the front door: my bed, my television and my cup of coffee. But when my house key no longer worked in my lock, I started to realize I had more immediate concerns.

Our locks had been changed, my housemate informed me, because the house had been busted into over the weekend. So, the front-page crime stories hit home, literally.

The recent spate of muggings and assaults on campus has caused quite an uproar among students and faculty. Crime feels distant until it happens on your block, or in front of where you live or to you personally. It's an unnerving realization when you find yourself sprinting home from the gym at night because you're scared witless of the "Screwdriver Mugger."

But students' safety is not just the responsibility of the Division of Public Safety. Safety is a two-way street, and the Penn population can take better precautions to protect itself.

This year, Penn spent $5 million bulking up safety on the immediate campus and by the off-campus housing neighborhoods. While some of the money may ultimately finance a shrewd PR maneuver to make the campus look safer superficially, the money is going toward tangible services that can actually be helpful if we use them. The problem is, we haven't really used them.

The money went to improving lighting on campus, doubling the number of SpectaGuards stationed on street corners on and off campus between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m. (and adorning them in fluorescent yellow jackets - they're hard to miss these days), and increasing the number of closed-circuit security cameras on or near campus to a total of 76. The jurisdiction for 898-WALK and 898-RIDE stretches from 30th street to 50th street and Spring Garden Street to Woodland Avenue - where most undergraduates live.

But the concern is that not enough people realize this. An unsettling chunk of students don't know what kind of safety provisions the school provides beyond SpectaGuards, like blue light phones that connect right to Penn police officers, which can be found everywhere on campus (and off campus).

Considering the prevalence of crime in the headlines, even before Tuesday's crime-laden Daily Pennsylvanian, my classmates (it was a class on polling, after all) and I surveyed several hundred Penn students to ascertain how safe the campus appears, compared with how safe they feel. In the survey we conducted, 70 percent of respondents said the campus appears safer because of these new measures, while 55 percent said they actually feel safer. The 15-point discrepancy should be tighter, but it's not terrible.

But other findings were more distressing. More than 50 percent of respondents found 898-WALK somewhat or very effective, yet two-thirds of them had never used the service.

According to DPS, the use of walking escorts is up 104 percent through the end of October, compared to the same point last year, with 9,153 requests from last year's 4,491 (though there were no data on whether people are using escorts more versus more people using them). Still, the DP reported in February that the number of requests in January remained steady from December 2005 despite a shooting on campus in mid-January.

Similarly, 64 percent of students said in the survey they found 898-RIDE somewhat or very effective, yet 67 percent admitted to never having used it. And even more disturbing, 8 percent of our respondents said blue light telephones were very effective in making them safer, with 97 percent having never used one. Granted, the phones are for emergencies, and it's better to not have to pick one up. But most of our respondents (in focus groups) didn't even know these phones existed, let alone where they were around campus.

Some crimes are harder to prevent than others. Calling a walking escort or even planting a security camera at the street corner would not have stopped the perpetrator from picking the lock on our front door and entering our kitchen while everyone was asleep. (It could have been done by someone working for the leasing agency, though University City Associates denies it.)

We don't live in a vacuum. This campus is not gated from the rest of the city, and people are wronged in even the most desolate places. We'll never completely shield ourselves living in a city, but DPS can only go so far if we don't act on our own.

Michelle Dubert is a College senior from Closter, N.J. Her e-mail address is dubert@dailypennsylvanian.com. Department of Strategery appears on Thursdays.

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