Staff editorial

Walk along Route 1 between Hartwick and Lehigh roads from midnight to 3 a.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, and you’ll likely spot a half-dozen police officers during the course of your stroll.

Step off the thoroughfare and the number of uniforms thins palpably. Though it’s still not all that likely you’ll fall prey to a robbery or assault, the crime rate rises accordingly, as most students can glean from this university’s late night police alerts.

The city’s reputation as a crime-heavy college town — particularly for a flagship state school — isn’t wholly undeserved, though it’s perhaps a touch exaggerated when compared with nearby Baltimore and Washington.

Gun crime and killings, such as 2013’s off-campus murder-suicide carried out by a university student, last summer’s murder of a sex worker in a Route 1 hotel and the county’s first murder of the year at the Camden College Park Apartments, are thankfully rare.

Nonetheless, rashes of break-ins and robberies crop up with disturbing regularity in the city, often affecting the university’s transient student population. Few student housing options have proven immune; in recent years, police have investigated such incidents at North Campus high-rise dorms and the pricey University View and The Varsity off-campus apartments.

At lower cost apartments and residences located elsewhere in the city, limited security and dilapidated locks and doors often render students’ personal property all too easy to come by.

Little more than a well-placed rap on the doors at the University Club apartments can give perpetrators enough space to bypass the locks, students reported, and multiple Diamondback employees had property stolen while living in the near-infamous Knox Box apartments before their demolition in the fall.

Even at the View and Varsity, which employ security cameras, restricted swipe access and security guards, nonresidents can sneak into the high-rises with relative ease through propped-open side entrances.

Admittedly, residents often drop the ball when it comes to existing safety measures and basic precaution, such as locking doors and preventing tailgating into buildings. But the frequency of reported break-ins and robberies suggest that landlords and managers need to re-examine the safety of the residences and apartments they lease out.

At Camden College Park, repeated complaints from residents about security concerns allegedly went unanswered even after police found 22-year-old Stefon Powell shot dead outside the complex on Jan. 1. While this editorial board doubts student housing will see an uptick in murders — massive statistical aberrations every time they involve members of the university community — it’s disturbing to think the management of apartment complexes would simply ignore any manner of qualm over safety.

The city has proven capable of tackling other areas of student safety head-on; it’s why we’ve seen a crackdown on jaywalking and so many police officers patrolling Route 1 nightly in the wake of last academic year’s pedestrian deaths. Students feel safer on the streets; hopefully, residence owners won’t stand by and let students feel at risk in their own homes.