I went down to the basement of Copley at 4:30 last night to get some snacks from the vending machine. For the first time at Georgetown, I feared for my safety as I walked through the halls of my dorm.

Strangely, the numerous burglaries in my dorm earlier in the year didn’t have the same effect. Maybe it was because of the late hour (similar to the times when the recent incidents took place in LXR), or perhaps it was because when I walked into the building a few minutes earlier, the security guard was fast asleep with her head between her arms, and didn’t even bother to look up when I swiped right in front of her.In that moment, I understood how the residents of LXR must feel.

Other people did too–I was relatively unsurprised to hear that an RA in the building was carrying a knife. Reports of more assaults in Village A and Henle are somehow no longer shocking. Is this past weekend to be a watershed for crime at Georgetown? Online comments on a recent Hoya article covering the LXR sexual assault suggest many things—mostly ridiculous, like calling for racial profiling, since all of the descriptions seem to be the same, of young dark-skinned males (if only everyone didn’t believe in race).

Beyond the unnecessary racial polarization of the issue, some users have suggested that DPS become a full-fledged police force. This newspaper’s position is well-documented on the issue of arming DPS, but anonymous users are calling for much more than that. They believe that Georgetown’s lack of a proper police force encourages crime, as a bubble where the security officers have no discretion or training to investigate crimes.Therefore, Georgetown will continue to attract crime as a target of opportunity.

Arming DPS further will apparently stop this.The real answer probably lies in more patrols, not more weapons. Rather than commit to upgrading DPS into an actual police department (unthinkable and unnecessary, with MPD just a phone call away), the university might want to begin by rethinking its patrolling policy.

According to another article in today’s Hoya, one security guard covers Village A, Alumni Square, LXR and Walsh. Allison Mead (SFS ‘10), a concerned student quoted for the story, raises an interesting question that is buried at the end of the article: “I have the emergency system. Why didn’t I get a text message to say, ‘Lock your doors; there is an intruder’?”

Perhaps because her door should have already been locked, but that’s beside the point: students should be able to feel safe inside their dorms, to not fear going to sleep in their own beds. Beyond that, there are so many issues here—involving fear, race, campus security (or lack thereof), the abilities, tactics and working conditions of DPS and Securitas (the security company notable for its sleeping guards)—that can’t really be solved with one showy strategy, or even just by urging everyone to lock their doors.

Many of the actions that have already been taken in LXR—replacing the GOcard reader, locking the emergency stairwell doors that permit anyone to bypass the guard desk—should have been done a long time ago. What to do next is the most difficult question; hopefully the debate won’t succumb to fear and choose costly and ineffective options.

-Jeff Reger, Associate Editor

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Campus News, Crime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.