This semester, the uptick in crime on College Hill has alarmed many in the Brown community. Though the semester is just over a month old, the Department of Public Safety has already issued three crime alerts regarding robberies just north of campus. In response, DPS has added 13 new officers, and the Providence Police Department and DPS have increased police presence in the area north of campus. We urge the University to continue to treat this matter with the utmost seriousness and hope they will innovate more ways to fortify off-campus areas.
This past December, we published an editorial regarding pedestrian safety and the greater steps that DPS and the University could take to crack down on reckless driving. We commend the administration's coordinated efforts with DPS and hope they will again bolster their efforts if public safety incidents continue to arise. Ensuring the safety of students, faculty and staff must be an essential, if unglamorous, priority for a university community.
Given that all of this semester's incidents have occurred north of campus, we are pleased to hear that DPS and PPD have focused their efforts in that location. And while we are enthusiastic about the possibility of increasing lighting on campus, given that the vast majority of crimes in the past two semesters have occurred off-campus, and given the University's extensive security apparatus on-campus, for the time being, it seems most important to focus on off-campus areas around College Hill.
Students living on-campus have assets like SafeRide, SafeWalk, blue light phones and security officers stationed at high-traffic locations. While the University cannot as easily account for its students who choose to live off-campus, it can certainly find new ways to increase its safety presence, particularly in the most populated off-campus areas north and southeast of campus. SafeRide OnCall has gone a long way towards allowing students living off-campus to get home safe, but surely more can be done.
We cannot talk about public safety in earnest without looking at ourselves, the student body. College Hill is a wonderful place, and we are very lucky to go to a school in a safe neighborhood — the readers who got deferred from Yale early decision should be nodding spitefully. That said, in the words of Russell Carey '91 MA '06, senior vice president for Corporation affairs and governance, Brown remains an "urban campus" and students are in no way "immune from criminal activity." No matter how effective the public safety measures of Brown and DPS are, they cannot create a crime-free bubble for our campus, and it is imperative that students stay vigilant and take caution.
We look forward to seeing the University and DPS introduce more strategies to ensure the safety of all its students — particularly those living off-campus.
Editorials are written by The Herald's editorial page board. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.
