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Campus crime down overall
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
The Faculty Senate Executive Committee learned yesterday that there has been a significant decline overall in criminal incidents at UB over the course of the past 10 years, despite an unusual increase in vehicle break-ins and textbook thefts in 2007.
Gerald Schoenle, chief of university police and chair of the UB Personal Safety Committee, was asked update the FSEC on campus safety at the behest of Robert Hoeing, chair of the Faculty Senate and associate professor of linguistics, who said the recent shootings at Northern Illinois University have shined a spotlight on issues related to campus safety.
"There have been different crimes that have happened to our students off campus," said Schoenle," but the reality is our on-campus crimes remain relatively low."
The only major increases in crime have been in incidents of petit larceny, he said, which rose from 150 in 2006 to 191 in 2007 on the North Campus and from 34 in 2006 to 52 in 2007 on the South Campus, as well as incidents of criminal mischief on the South Campus, which rose from 60 in 2006 to 71 in 2007. He said most of these reports were related to textbook thefts or vehicle break-ins, in which criminals frequently targeted global positioning system (GPS) devices.
In response to this recent spate of thefts, Schoenle said that university police took several steps, primarily on the South Campus, to educate students, faculty and staff about the danger of vehicle break-ins. As part of the University Police Vehicle Burglary Initiative 2008, he said that university police officers posted notifications in buildings across the South Campus, warning the university community about leaving valuables in cars—as well as blanketed vehicles last month with vehicle "report cards" informing drivers whether their vehicle had passed or failed in terms of preventing theft. Faculty, staff and students who were found to have left valuables, such as purses or laptops, in plain sight in their vehicles also received a personal phone call from a university police officer, he said.
"This is something we call problem-oriented policing," said Schoenle, "where we try to identify a problem, see when it's happening, increase our patrols, educate the students and try to make arrests. We can have a great effect by doing that."
There has not yet been a vehicle break-in reported on either the North or South Campus so far this year, he said.
While declines have been seen in nearly all categories of criminal activity at the university over the past decade, Schoenle said several serious crimes were reported on the North Campus in 2007. One was a robbery in which a female student was accosted and had her purse stolen after leaving her car near South Lake Village. He said Buffalo Police apprehended the offender, who remains incarcerated. Schoenle also described an incident in December in which a woman told police she was kidnapped while walking behind the Center for the Arts in the late afternoon and taken to a secluded spot on Frontier Road, near Newman Chapel, and raped. The victim in this incident has not been cooperative with law enforcement and no progress has been made in the investigation of the case, he said.
In other business, Ilia Nossov, student representative to the UB Council, raised several issues that he said were of importance to students. Of greatest concern, he said, is the lack of a student health center on the North Campus. "Right now, we have a health center for students on the South Campus, in Michael Hall, but there's no health facility on the North Campus, where we have between 6,000 and 7,000 students—whereas South Campus has about 1,000," he said. He pointed out that sick students on the North Campus now must drive or take a bus to the South Campus, which can be a lengthy trip, particularly during winter weather.
Peter Nickerson, director of the pathology program in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, objected to locating a student health center on the North Campus, voicing concern that a second health center on the North Campus could cause a shortage of staff members and equipment at the South Campus center. Possible solutions suggested by other senators included creating a small satellite heath center on the North Campus that would work in conjunction with the facilities in Michael Hall, or contracting with an outside taxi service or existing on-campus student group to provide faster and more convenient transportation from the North Campus for sick students traveling to the South Campus for health services.