INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CLUB FUNDING: Senator Matthew Hoyt (COL ’12—Alumni Square/Village B) introduced a bill to allocate $300 to the International Relations Club to host a musical group called “White Flag” dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Speaker Adam Talbot (COL ’12—LXR) said the Israeli and Palestinian performers work together to use music to promote discussion about peace and social justice. SAC and various other groups are also co-sponsoring the event. The bill passed unanimously.

Senator Colton Malkerson (COL ’13—Harbin 2-5) pointed out that this would be the kind of event the new GUSA Fund would sponsor in the future.

“It’s an introduction to the idea of GUSA finding part in student funding,” Hoyt agreed. “When a group isn’t able to [attain] enough funding from the different funding boards they can come to GUSA, especially for such student-wide, campus community events.”

“THE FUND” PROGRESS: Speaking of the new GUSA Fund, GUSA President Calen Angert (MSB ’11) says he intends to convene the Funding Board November 23 to get the Fund off the ground. Additionally, the executive plans to start an application process for members of the Fund. Talbot said, “It will take a couple of weeks to pull it all together.”

GUSA will also be holding a “Club Summit” to get input from club leaders and announce the findings of the Club Funding Survey. The Summit will be held this Saturday at 1 p.m. in Healy 104 and will be livestreamed.

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Georgetown students and administrators conducted a panel in the ICC Auditorium about Georgetown’s response to hate crimes last Thursday.

Several administrators attended the panel, included Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson and Vice President for University Safety Rocco DelMonaco. While there was little information about the crimes, the forum was full of information about safety at Georgetown.

DEFINING HATE CRIMES: The moderator pressed Olson to explain why Public Safety Alerts typically say “bias-related incident” instead of “hate crime.” Olson said Georgetown uses a legalistic definition of hate crime that only certain crimes qualify under.

When GUSA Speaker Adam Talbot (COL ‘12) asked Olson about the GUSA Senate’s bill to change the way hate crimes are treated under the Student Code of Conduct, Olson said the Office of Student Conduct would consider the legislation, but declined to say whether it would be adopted.

STUDENT PATROLS: In meetings after the hate crimes, GU Pride and other students have talked about organizing a group of students patrol campus at night, presumably to prevent hate crimes. DelMonaco pointed students towards other student-run safety groups like the Students Safety Advisory Board and APO’s shuttle service; Olson seemed less than enthusiastic about the idea.

“We need to make sure that if we’re putting students out in a patrol function, that those students are going to be safe,” Olson said.

More about security cameras on campus, arming DPS and Solidarity’s spat with Rocco after the jump!

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Students concerned by the recent anti-gay hate crimes will have the chance to meet with University officials to discuss what can be done to improve student safety today at 8 p.m. in the ICC Auditorium.  In preparation for the meeting, a group of students held a discussion yesterday to decide what topics to bring up at the meeting.

After much debate and discussion, the students decided on a set of goals to bring up at today’s meeting, namely better communication on- and off-campus among appropriate safety organizations, a more tolerant culture, better pay and conditions for Department of Public Safety officers, changing the student conduct code to make hate crimes a Type C violation, and protecting students by offering self defense classes and a possible volunteer task force to help walk students home on late nights.

The issues of better pay for DPS officers and changing the Student Code of Conduct especially struck a cord, and many said that having the lowest paid campus officers in the city is creating a “revolving door” situation, where the officers come to Georgetown for paid training and then leave for other universities.

As for the changing of the Student Code of Conduct, there was also a consensus that hate crimes need to be treated with as much seriousness as assault, sexual assault, and theft.

Survey Says…

GUSA has compiled the results of their “Omnibus Student Survey,” the summer survey which polled the student body on everything from GUSA’s structure, student diversity, and GUTS buses, to student safety, academics, and the free newspaper program and earned its chief organizer, GUSA President Calen Angert (MSB `11) high marks on the Angertometer.

Here’s what the 1,020 student respondents said, according to an email from Angert (because of a glitch with UIS, the are no breakdowns available for individual questions):

• 29 percent of students said they felt unrepresented by GUSA last year

• 77 percent of respondents rated GUSA’s student advocacy track record “poor” or were unsure of how they felt, but 20 percent approved of their past programming

• 66 percent felt that Georgetown is a diverse campus and the same number felt there is “sufficient programming, as organized by faculty and staff, on campus that engages students on the subject of diversity”

• Over 90 percent said they would support a continuation of Saturday GUTS bus routes and an expanded GUTS route to include a bus to a grocery store (GUSA recently accomplished the latter)

• 91 percent said they felt safe on campus, but two-thirds of respondents would like to see increased DPS patrols

• 92 percent agreed that “the university fosters an environment that is conducive to intellectual learning.”

• 89 percent said that they had read a free newspaper provided on campus by the Collegiate Readership Program that was recently suspended due to funding issues

After the jump, see all the results Angert provided in his e-mail!

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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

After you read the Voice’s editorial about improving DPS training and working conditions after last weekend’s startling events, consider the campus-wide e-mail sent this morning.

It seems the university response is:
1. More DPS officers around at night.
2. More ResLife staffers milling about dorms and apartments.
3. Senior university officials milling about campus late at night.

While I’m not entirely sure what a senior university official or ResLife staffer can do stop a man wielding a pipe, it’s understandable that some stepped-up efforts would be made. It’s the thinly-veiled warning that parties aren’t going to last as long that follows that is a bit troubling.

I’m not trying to advocate for partying like idiots, but I also don’t want martial law on Georgetown’s campus. The warnings against holding large parties and advertising on Facebook seem less like innocuous advice and more like a threat that parties will be broken up more readily than before. The danger of this becoming a de facto on-campus curfew is obvious.

While we, as students, should appreciate the stepped-up safety efforts, we need to remember a couple of things. First, we live in a city where crime is going to happen no matter what. Severely limiting it is a reasonable goal; stamping it out is an impossibility. Second, violent crime has long been the exception, not the rule, on the average weekend. While we never want to see a repeat the events of this past weekend, we also should remember-and feel lucky-that they don’t occur too often.

In the end, we should heed the words of Benjamin Franklin – “Those who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Posted by Mike Stewart, Feature Editor