If a car is stolen in College Park and no crime alert goes out, does that mean the theft didn’t happen?
With the month of June finished and a holiday weekend about to start, students living in College Park this summer certainly have reason to believe crime in the town has hit an all-time low, as University Police sent out not a single crime alert for the whole month. But unfortunately for students, this does not mean crime has disappeared from the city. In fact, crime is up – 41 property crimes occurred this June, compared to 27 in June 2007.
But students shouldn’t worry, according to University Police Spokesman Paul Dillon. Despite the number of crimes rising from a year ago, Dillon told The Diamondback yesterday that the police didn’t feel any of the crimes warranted an e-mail to students because the crimes didn’t affect the entire campus population.
Clearly, the police haven’t learned their lessons from last summer, when they took a similarly laissez-faire approach to crimes happening near the campus. During summer 2007, several rape and sexual assault cases occurred near the campus without a single alert being sent out to warn students of the possible danger, despite the crimes occurring near student off-campus housing.
The position the police have staked on summer crime alerts is absolutely unacceptable. The policy of only sending out alerts on crimes the police deem relevant removes the most important crime prevention tool students possess from their hands: information. By treating crime alerts as necessary only on a need-to-know basis, the police are keeping the students from protecting themselves by restricting access to knowledge about crime in College Park.
There are many reasons the police may have taken this position. Crime alerts probably aren’t useful for every crime, and too many e-mails could actually be detrimental, as an e-mail for every crime could callous students to the seriousness of the crimes themselves. Likewise, the police certainly don’t want a Chicken Little situation, with students fearing the worst every time they turn a corner in College Park.
However, even with justifiable reasons for not sending an alert for every single crime that occurs, it is simply inexcusable for an entire month to go by without an alert, as if crime suddenly took four weeks off for vacation. It is a situation Dillon and University Police must rectify, as another month cannot pass with students left in the dark.
