After four sexual assaults in the last two weeks in the neighborhood around American University, DCist reports that “Officials from all universities in the area, including Georgetown, George Washington, UDC and American, have been briefed by police to put their students on alert.”

If that’s the case, why hasn’t Georgetown’s DPS sent out an alert? Students should be finding about crime risks from their university police, not from city-wide blogs. The sexual assaults weren’t at Georgetown, but if MPD thinks there is a reason to believe Georgetown students should be alerted, we should know.

Public Safety’s reticence is especially embarrassing after the University was chastised for being slow to tell students about 2007’s hate crime. Georgetown spokesperson Julie Green Bataille hasn’t responded to a request for comment.
Update: Spokesperson Julie Green Bataille responds via email:

Georgetown was notified of the incidents as part of regular conversations with MPD but was not asked to notify our community related to these incidents. Consistent with our public safety alert process if there was reason to believe there was an ongoing threat to members of our community we would issue a notification. In this case there are no current plans to do so.

We’re looking deeper into this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm and is filed under News, Vox Populi. 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.