A new school year has started, which means a new crop of freshmen victims... er ...students have arrived.
Ohio State administration wants you to be excited about the programs for your social and academic benefit. The sports fans want you to yell "Go Bucks," the local businesses want you to spend your money at their establishments and your fellow students want you to get drunk.
Some just want your company. Others want your wallet. A few want to rape you. Notice I haven't even gotten to the street criminals yet.
Then there's me.
I'm here to remind you of all the bad things that can happen. Don't worry. I won't ruin your fun because I'm stuck in The Lantern. Avoiding me is easy. Avoiding becoming a crime statistic might be harder to pull off.
This past spring quarter, I covered basic crime prevention and awareness strategies. If you follow them, you should significantly reduce your chances of becoming acquainted with such things as "blunt object hangover" and "the emergency room blues." My main message was (and still is): Your safety is up to you.
If you're just starting to read my column, you might wish to go to The Lantern's Web site and do a search for the "Safety Guy." This way you can read my past nine columns on crime prevention and awareness. It'll get you up to speed.
Now why don't we all do a little computer exercise? Go to the OSU main Web site at osu.edu and look for something labeled "crime prevention," "safety information" or perhaps "campus safety."
Can't find it, can you? That's because verbiage such as this is hidden under either "support" or "information." We can't have the words "safety" or "crime" on the main page, now, can we? Why, you would think OSU was located in the middle of a high crime area or something. (Actually, we are.)
In fact, our former police chief described OSU campus as "a shopping center" for criminals. Think about that for a moment. Your stuff may be the "product" a crook is "shopping" for. In rare cases, the "product" could be you. Now click on the "Department of Public Safety" link and look at the left side of your screen. Click on the "Clery Act." This is the federal law that requires universities to collect and divulge crime statistics for the campus and surrounding areas. No, the link doesn't take you directly to the stats, you'll need to click on the "Annual Crimes Report" to get there. Then, you'll have Adobe Acrobat to read it. (No one said this was going to be easy - good luck if you have dial-up.)
What happens when you finally get to the stats page?
It's all the way at the bottom. Print out pages 24 through 30. Look at all the zeros and ones in 2004's "aggravated assaults." Compare these numbers to previous years. Now compare 2004's "public property" burglary and robbery numbers with previous years. These crimes dropped quite a bit, didn't they?
No. This discrepancy is because of a change in how the Clery Act now interprets public property "adjacent to" the campus. "Adjacent to" now means the public roadway and the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, but not any commercial or private dwellings adjoining that sidewalk. If you want to be included in OSU's crime stats, then get shot while on High Street walking outside the 12th Street United Dairy Farmers. If you get shot inside the UDF, you won't be included.
University Police Assistant Chief Rick Amweg, who compiles the statistics, said, "The current regulations preclude the university from accurately reflecting crime trends in what we have traditionally referred to as the 'university community.'"
In the meantime, want something useful? Currently playing on the right side of the Science and Engineering Library entry hall is my bike security display. It shows you the proper way to lock up your bike and has information on how to "bug" it. This even has pictures for those of you with doctorates. Lock your bike up right to prevent those miserable "orphan wheels."
See you next week.
Karl Spaulding is a student of violence, and tolerates comments at spaulding.10@osu.edu.
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