A REMARKABLE thing happened last week in the great City of Charlottesville. The police arrested an individual suspected in two armed robberies that occurred last Monday. The suspect, an 18-year-old boy, approached University students on 14th and 15th streets, pulled out a gun, ordered them to the ground, and left with their wallets and cell phones.
What makes this case remarkable is, sadly, not the taking of property or use of a handgun, but that the individual actually got caught. I find it ironic that the arrest received front page attention in The Cavalier Daily, while many of these types of crimes only get short blurbs within the paper.
Maybe the reason for this cursory treatment of robberies is because the arrest is far rarer than the crime. We all get the e-mails from the University Police when crimes occur, and I know I am not alone in skimming for the location and then hitting the delete button.
The University Police and Charlottesville Police departments do not seem to understand their safety tips defy the realities of going to college. Whether we should walk alone or in dark areas, the reality is that we often have to. College towns need better surveillance, and the police departments should fill that role.
In reading the article about the recent arrest, I was struck by University spokesperson Carol Wood's comments about how students should stay safe: "There are a whole host of things that students can do to protect themselves. Let your roommate or your friend know that you're going to be out late or walking in a certain area. Charlottesville really is a generally safe community, but you can't throw caution to the wind, so to speak, so you have to use good judgment." What stuck me about this comment was the lack of understanding of college life. Informing my roommates that I will be walking home around 12:30 a.m. on 14th Street will not prevent me from being robbed, murdered or raped. If they are not with me to either discourage the perpetrator or to fight him or her off, then informing them of my location will do only that.
Also, Charlottesville is not the haven we would all like it to be. According to Area Connect, an online directory of information for different localities, Charlottesville had 826.8 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2005. The national average was 554.4 violent crimes per 100,000 people. And Charlottesville looks even worse when the crimes are broken down into categories, with 94.3 rapes (compared to the national average of 34.6), and 533.2 aggravated assaults (compared to the national average of 340.1)per 100,000 people. Clearly, Charlottesville is not the safest of communities.
Wood also suggested in the article that students should utilize UTS buses and Safe Ride to further protect themselves from becoming victims of crime. But buses stop running at 12:20 a.m. on weeknights, and most importantly, they do not drop you off at your doorstep. Last year, there was a rash of robberies in Lambeth Field, and some of these occurred in the colonnade that students must walk through to get home from the bus stop. The locations of the most recent crimes, 15th Street, Wertland and Jefferson Park Avenue, are more susceptible to robberies because they are a bit of a walk from the closest bus stop.
SafeRide is equally unreliable. According to SafeRide's Web site, its objective is to transport individuals near the Alderman and Clemons libraries to locations within a one-mile radius of Newcomb Hall, and it will not provide transportation for drunken students, the students who need it the most. SafeRide has proven worthless to me countless times in the past. There have been times when I called, and no one even picked up. So, SafeRide is not the solution for increasing student safety either.
Students are not inherently careless; we do not intentionally "throw caution to the wind." But when I get e-mails about crimes and never hear anything about arrests, it numbs me. Instead of continuously suggesting the obvious, police should increase surveillance of off-Grounds areas to prevent these crimes from occurring. Matt Schrimper, a College representative to Student Council, agrees, adding that the University, "must work with the city to build well-lit pedestrian crosswalks and bridges over the railroads, develop a blue phone system in off-Grounds housing areas, and noticeably increase joint-department police presence, particularly on weekday nights." All of these steps, none of which is drastic, could significantly deter crime and improve student safety in Charlottesville.
The key to increasing safety is prevention. Though the tips provided by the University are reasonable, they are not a solution.
Lindsay Huggins's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at lhuggins@cavalierdaily.com.
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