Lisa Zhu | Playing it safe

Two Penn students walk into a bar. The DJ says to them, "Why are you talking to that girl?" Then, bouncers come and beat the two guys until one of them loses consciousness.

If this joke doesn't seem very funny to you, that's because it wasn't a joke. This incident actually happened over the summer to two College seniors, Aaron Abrams and Edward Wilson, who preferred not to use his real name.

The two were at a Center City bar around 1 a.m. on a Saturday night, where Abrams had an extremely brief conversation with a young woman. "Immediately, the DJ came over, looking incredibly irate," Wilson said. "He called a group of bouncers, and they pushed us towards the back of the bar."

What happened next could have come straight out of Fight Club. More than five bouncers threw the young men to the ground and repeatedly struck them. "I put my hands in the air, saying I didn't want to fight," Wilson said. "They punched me in the head three times and threw me around the back of the bar."

Abrams received the brunt of the beatings. "I was bleeding a lot, my face was bloodied and scratched up, but the fact that I was knocked out was probably the most significant thing," he said. Soon after, he discovered that his new iPhone was missing.

The experience Abrams and Wilson underwent is extreme but not completely uncommon.

Too often, Penn students assume that Center City, with its bright lights, upscale restaurants and crowded bars, is safer than West Philly. That's hardly the case.

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, only 14 more violent crimes took place in 2007 in Police District 18 (where Penn's campus lies) than in the two districts making up Center City. On a per capita basis, the crime rate is actually higher in Center City than in District 18.

As a result, students who exhibit caution on campus but let down their guard when downtown fall victim to the illusion of safety generated by Center City's busier night life.

Although the neighborhood surrounding our campus may have lower housing values than the posh apartments in Rittenhouse Square, Penn has a formidable police department exclusively dedicated to ensuring the safety of its students.

"Our priority is to take care of students who have just come to the city, many of whom have never lived in a city before," said Division of Public Safety Vice President Maureen Rush. "We have 116 Penn police officers, 176 security personnel and over 500 AlliedBarton guards devoted to a population in one highly concentrated area."

For anyone doing the math, that's about one police officer for every 80 students - compare that to one police officer per 227 people for the city of Philadelphia. "[The Philadelphia Police Department] won't be able to give the same kind of TLC to a student in distress," Rush said.

Wilson and Abrams definitely ran up against that challenge during the follow-up to their assault incident. "Three of the bouncers got charged with aggravated assault [that night]," Abrams said. "But when we went to the police station the next day, they said that the crime got downgraded to a simple assault, and there was a 99-percent chance it wouldn't be pursued by the district attorney because they had more serious crimes going on."

The takeaway from this story shouldn't be that Center City is too dangerous for Penn students.

Instead, when we choose to leave campus, we should be careful to maintain the same amount of vigilance and common sense we use to keep ourselves safe in West Philadelphia. Go out with larger groups of friends, as opposed to one or two other people. Leave a bar when a fight is about to break out. Don't leave your belongings unattended.

And in the very unfortunate circumstance that a crime does happen to you off campus, Penn students can still access the same resources.

"If someone were victimized outside of our patrol area, we will be there to give them all the same support services they get [on campus] when they call us," Rush said.

"But if we don't know about it, we can't help them."

Lisa Zhu is a Wharton and College senior from Cherry Hill, N.J., and United Minorities Council chairwoman. Her e-mail is zhu@dailypennsylvanian.com. Zhu-ology appears every Thursday.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.