Journal 5

For my investigative report, I am looking into safety at East Halls: how safe people feel, the amount of crimes that occur at East, and what is being done to help make the campus safer. Out of all of the places at East, a large amount of crimes occur in the dorms. Most of the dorms at East are very similar and have similar ways of keeping the residents safe and keeping unwanted people out. In order to get in, a student from the building needs to swipe their I.D. card at the entrance. This seems like a great safety measure, as anyone who doesn’t live in the building can’t get in without someone from the building letting them in. There’s even a very loud and obnoxious alarm that goes off when the door is open for a certain amount of time to make sure that anyone from outside can just walk right in. The problem is that even with these safety features, it is still fairly easy for anyone to get in whatever dorm building they want by either pretending to live in the building and have someone open the door from them, or by “piggybacking” and having someone who lives in the dorm let someone in the door as they walk in, even though they don’t know them. Now that they are in the dorm, they are able to commit whatever crime they had planned, whether it is finding an empty, open room to steal something, or a whole different kind of crime, like indecent exposure, both of which are crimes that have occurred in East Halls in the past two months.
I asked my R.A. Ryan, a fourth-year student at Pennypacker, a few question about safety in East Halls. When I asked him if he thought if East Halls were safe, he said “I think East Halls are generally pretty safe, there really isn’t that much crime. I mean, there’s always something going on, but never really anything major.” I then asked him if he thought East was safer compared to the rest of campus, and he said “Not really. Actually, East is less safe than the other resident halls because of all of the freshman here that are more likely to commit crimes than other students.” I also asked Richard, a first year student in my dorm, if had heard about any crimes that had occurred in East. He told me that “A couple weeks ago in Packer, some drunk, naked guy barged into a room and tried to get into bed with some random girl who was sleeping. I don’t know if he was arrested or not, but he was cited for underage drinking.”
I found out many interesting facts about safety at Penn State on the campus police’s website, www.police.psu.edu. One thing I found out was about Penn State’s Auxiliary Police, which uses students to “provide extra eyes and ears to the police and deter misconduct and criminal behavior through visible patrols.” These Auxiliary Police Officers patrol around residence halls, including East, and report any suspicious activity or crimes to the campus police to take care of. Also on this website, I found that if someone has witnessed a crime on campus and wants to report it anonymously, he or she can use Penn State’s “Silent Witness Program” to email the details of the crime to campus police. In "Policies, Safety, & U,” an annual crime report published by Penn State, many of Penn State’s crime statistics and safety procedures are detailed. According to the report, liquor law violations and larceny (theft) are the two most commonly reported crimes on campus. The report also details many of the ways Penn State works to prevent crime, such as the Penn State Police Walking Escort Service that has police escorts available “from dusk to dawn” 365 days a year, the 2,700 walkway lights that provide safe roads and paths to use at night, and the more than 200 emergency phones places all around campus.
One thing that I want to look further into for my report is how safety in East really compares to other places at Penn State, which I can find out by looking at police and crime reports from places all over campus and from different years. Another thing I really feel like I should to do is interview someone from the campus police, whether it is an officer or someone who works for the police, as they can probably answer many of the questions I have and probably give me many great details and facts about crime and safety in East Halls and at Penn State.