Don’t panic! Despite several burglaries and three armed robberies in October, the SMU and University Park Police Departments assure students that their campus is no more dangerous now than it was this time last year. And for the most part, they’re right.
With only two months to go in this year, the 2002 crime statistics don’t look a whole lot different than from years past. The number of burglaries, or nonviolent theft, is down almost 40 percent from last year. (Sixty-five percent from 2000.) The number of stolen cars has hovered around the level of 10 to 13 car thefts every year. This year looks no different with 11 thefts reported since the end of October. Only one robbery, or theft with threat of violence, has been reported on campus so far.
Granted, these statistics only include crimes committed on the SMU campus and do not count two of October’s three armed robberies, but even these incidents, while cause for concern, should not cause students to cower around campus fearful that there’s an assailant around every corner.
There is little basis to suspect that the three robberies are the work of a serial criminal. Police believe the robbers in the Oct. 11 incident, in which two Meadows students were robbed while walking along Binkley Avenue, were two slender black men in their 20s dressed in dark clothes. Victims of an Oct. 17 robbery at the La Madeleine in the Park Cities Plaza shopping center described their assailants as two Hispanic men in a Mitsubishi Montero with no visible gun. The perpetrator of the most violent attack, in which two students were held to the ground while their car was stolen, was described as a lone Hispanic man in his early 20s with curly black hair. He was armed with a gun. Police believe that three different suspects committed each of the robberies.
It appears that the area just happens to have been hit hard at the wrong time. While it’s always a good idea to be aware of your surroundings and travel in pairs after dark, the track record is hardly cause to lock your doors, shutter your windows and hide under the mattress once the sun goes down.
More disturbing is the fact that many of this year’s car burglaries have occurred in the same location – the Dedman 3 Lot. While requiring freshman men to park in that slightly inconvenient spot is defensible, subjecting them to a higher risk of theft is not. Whether or not there are fewer burglaries this year, if a greater number of them are concentrated in a specific area, greater security precautions need to be taken to control traffic in the area. Security cameras, gated parking or even a fence are options the SMU PD should consider.
While the SMU PD should be commended for their work in alerting the campus to the incidents of the past month and trying to keep them in perspective for students, there is still work to be done in preventing crime on our campus. Let’s get to it.
