Cautious students can prevent most campus offenses
After the school shooting in Connecticut last fall, a shooting that followed an increased number of shootings on campuses including Virginia Tech and Lone Star College near Houston, awareness of crime and safety on college campuses has increased.
Dan Williams, chief of police, said MSU is safer than students typically realize, but that there are still some problems officials need to address.
“Theft is probably our biggest problem on campus,” Williams said. “We’ve had a rash of burglaries towards the end of last semester and the beginning of this semester.”
To Williams, the real tragedy is that students could easily prevent most on-campus thefts if they were more cautious with their belongings.
“Young adults just have a tendency to not really worry about their personal safety and items as much as older adults tend to,” Williams said. “If they would simply lock their doors, that’s all it would take to resolve it.”
Williams said many students let their guard down on campus because they trust their classmates.
“You hate to think that students are going to take [the belongings of other student], but students represent the normal populous out there, and there’s a certain percentage that’s going to take advantage of other students,” Williams said.
Vice President of Student Affairs Keith Lamb said he agrees that students can prevent most of these thefts by exercising some common sense around their belongings, but campus officials can do more to educate students.
“It is obvious that we aren’t getting the message out very well because people still leave their doors unlocked and stuff comes up missing,” Lamb said.
Lamb said he understands it can be inconvenient for students to lock their door just to use the bathroom down the hall, but the alternative can be much worse.
“It’s a bigger inconvenience to come back and find things missing,” Lamb said.
Most of the thefts on campus occur in the residency halls, with the highest proportion of them taking place in Pierce Hall. This means that university police must work closely with housing faculty and resident advisers.
Assistant Housing Director Angie Reay said campus police have started making rounds of the residence halls to make students feel safer in their homes.
“It’s good to have them as a presence in our buildings,” Reay said.
Reay said the police also make up for the lack of cameras in the dorms.
“We have cameras mainly at our entrance and exit areas,” Reay said. “We do have community bathrooms in our halls, so we can’t have our cameras up there.”
Since Williams took over as chief of police two-and-a-half-years ago, according to Lamb, the police are doing more presentations on campus than they have ever done before.
“The last couple of years under Chief Williams they’ve really started community policing,” Lamb said. “We have a very proactive police force on campus.”
Williams said he encourages his officers to be more active on campus.
“Get out there and be seen. Even if nothing else is going on, be out in that truck,” Williams said. “If they’re seeing you out there, it’s less likely that they’re going to commit a crime.”
He added that it is hard to change someone’s mind when they have already decided to commit a crime.
“But if we’re vigilant enough to be seen,” Williams said, “it may prevent them from [committing crimes] on our campus.”