How safe are Ohio State’s off-campus neighborhoods?
More than 218,000 calls to 911 were made from the off-campus area over the past five years. The most common calls were for property crimes, but the rare, more violent crimes can lead to rumors.
Police block North Pearl Street behind the McDonald’s parking lot where shots were fired on Aug. 25, 2019. One person was transported to the Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State after being shot in the thigh.
Jack Long|Managing Editor for Digital Content
Published Feb. 25, 2021
Walking home after a late night of studying at the library, Gabriella Rincón, a fourth-year in environmental engineering, plugged in her headphones and sang out loud to one of her favorite songs.
The walk to Rincón’s house on Patterson and Indianola avenues from Thompson Library was about 30 minutes, and she said she hadn’t feared heading home alone late at night until November 2019.
She passed a man outside of a church near her house who, when he saw her, she said “dropped his pants and started obscenely touching his genitals.”
“He started coming towards me, and I was like — I think I was shocked a little bit so I was like, ‘This isn’t happening, this is not real,’” Rincón said.
Rincón said the man began to follow her as she crossed the street, so she ran around the block until a friend could come get her. Then, she called the Columbus Police.
Her call is just one of tens of thousands of 911 calls made from the off-campus area each year, a Lantern analysis of run call data provided by Columbus Police showed.
The most common calls made for service have to do with general disturbances and property crime, such as burglary — making Rincón’s call out of the ordinary. Crime rates are expected to be high because of how densely populated the off-campus area is and how high the area’s turnover rate is, experts told The Lantern. But the types of crime and overall safety of the area are unique to the campus setting.
The Columbus Police was called more than 218,000 times over the past five years from callers in the off-campus cruiser districts. These encompass the neighborhoods north of West Lane Avenue to East Arcadia Avenue, east of High Street to just beyond Summit Street, west of Olentangy River Road to North Star Road and south of 11th Avenue to West Third Avenue.
From 2015 to October 2020, nearly 27,000 calls classified as a disturbance were made — about 25 times higher than calls for shots fired in the same time frame. “Disturbances” is a broad category used as a “catch-all,” which includes calls such as loud parties, music or fireworks — anything classified as a “breach of the peace.”
More common calls include reports for suspicious persons and burglary alarms, with each accounting for more than 10,700 calls. Not all calls for police assistance result in reports.
The streets east of High Street are lined with houses, duplexes and apartment buildings for students who want to live off campus, but these neighborhoods are where a majority of disturbances that police respond to occur.
Lantern File Photo
Experts with experience as a part of the Columbus Police said that compared to the rest of the city, the off-campus area sees less calls for service — and it’s also one of the most underreported areas of town despite being perhaps the most densely populated neighborhood.
Christopher Bowling, police consultant and retired police commander for Columbus Zone 4, which includes most of the off-campus area, said because the area is densely populated, when major crimes occur, rumors can spawn and misinformation can spread in a way that sometimes inhibits police from doing their job. This was recently seen after the shooting death of student Chase Meola off campus when rumors that his death was a result of gang activity began to spread. Columbus Police have said there is no evidence of this.
“This information flies because we all have connectivity with each other right now. And so it flies faster, further … it just really takes off. It’s hard to get back on top of and control it,” Bowling said.
Two law enforcement officials validated and one was “not surprised” by the Lantern’s 911 call findings regarding the types of calls, when they occur and where — meaning the off-campus area is more prone to property crimes than violent crimes compared to other areas in Columbus while accounting for just 4 percent of the city’s annual calls.
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Rincón said once she was safely back at her apartment, she called the police.
“They were like, ‘OK, there’s not a ton we can do, but we can send a patrol car out,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, that’d be great because some of my roommates are still coming home, they’re gonna be coming home later and I want to make sure no one has to see him or is followed home by him,’” Rincón said.
Rincón’s call was among 83 indecent exposure calls in 2019.
Calls are also most likely to come in between the hours of 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., The Lantern’s analysis found, and one expert said that crime tends to spike when students return to the area following academic breaks.
How does crime in the off-campus area differ from other areas?
The safety of the area in which most students live has been subject to more scrutiny than ever since the city of Columbus broke its homicide record for one year in 2020 and the homicide of student Chase Meola in the off-campus area Oct. 11, 2020.
Although the most common calls off campus are for issues such as property crimes, Bowling said when major crimes occur, the biggest problem is not student safety after the fact: it’s the spread of false information.
Bowling recalled an incident during his time as zone commander in which an Ohio State sorority member was robbed by a woman at gunpoint on East 15th Avenue. The incident kicked off a frenzy of uncorroborated information that resulted in phones ringing “off the hook” from concerned parents.
“It started this weird chain reaction that gang members were targeting Greek life, ‘Folks, don’t wear your Greek letters. Don’t do this, don’t do that. They’re over doing this,’” Bowling said. “And we couldn’t substantiate any of that. Again, it seems to be more opportunistic kind of things that I saw when I was there. But the bad information just again takes off at lightspeed.”
More than 300 mourners gather outside of the William Oxley Thompson statue to celebrate the life of Chase Meola on Oct. 11, 2020.
Owen Milnes|Campus Producer
The off-campus area saw a similar pattern with the shooting death of Chase Meola near a fraternity party Oct. 11, 2020, which prompted rumors of possible gang retaliation and caused Ohio State and Columbus Police to release a statement saying there was no evidence of gang activity in the case.
The spreading of rumors around major crimes is in part due to implicit racial bias, Sgt. James Fuqua, public information officer for the Columbus Police, said.
“For example, two days in a row, like a car break-in, two different people, and they happen to be young, and they happen to be Black and say they have dreadlocks or something,” Fuqua said. “Now in your mind implicitly, the next time you see someone young, Black and dreadlocks, you’re going to associate them with breaking into cars.”
Fuqua said these implicit biases are a major part of the problem in policing today. He said he was very familiar with the rumors swirling after Meola’s death about the perpetrator being a member of a gang, which police confirmed to be false.
“It was such an abnormal thing to happen on campus, that people panicked and people started making these narratives,” Fuqua said. “Everyone is taking it to the extreme of — now everyone’s assessment, especially if you’re young and you’re Black, you ‘absolutely could be part of the murder team’ … this was a textbook case of implicit biases spiraling out of control.”
To see the methodology, click here.
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Fourth-year in social work Audrey Montgomery’s sublease had just ended in August 2019 when she packed all of her belongings, valuables and personal security information into her car and headed over to her friend’s apartment for a brief stay while she was between leases.
Her car, containing the majority of her belongings such as her backpack and laptop, was carefully parked in her friend’s apartment’s private parking lot the night of the crime. She said she didn’t want to take up too much space in her friend’s home.
One morning during her stay, Montgomery walked outside to grab some deodorant from her car, and was met by two of her friend’s neighbors standing there, staring at her smashed passenger side window and the bags and boxes that packed the car had been tossed around and rummaged through.
Montgomery said she hadn’t heard her car alarm go off, either.
“I called my mom. When I started to explain what had happened, I just broke down in tears,” Montgomery said. “I was pretty scared because I didn’t know what to do next, and I didn’t know what had been taken at that point and was kind of scared to find out.”
Despite having a car packed with clothes and other belongings, the perpetrators only stole her backpack, which she said she stored underneath the seat, just in case. In it contained her laptop, her passport and her social security card.
Montgomery explained she had recently been hired as a university ambassador and had all of her personal security information in her backpack to fill out all of the HR paperwork.
Montgomery filed a police report, but her property was never recovered, and no one was charged for the crime.
“I was just expecting a little bit more and expecting [the officer] to drive away and me feeling like, ‘OK, there’s a little bit of hope that I might be able to find my bag or get some sort of justice’ or whatever, but I definitely did not feel that way,” Montgomery said.
Bowling said he wasn’t surprised that the most common calls come from disturbances and burglary alarms; he said the nature of the off-campus area, being that it is crowded and also sees a lot of turnover year to year, makes it a location for “opportunist” criminals to strike.
Because it’s known that college students live in the area, Bowling said that indicates to potential burglars that electronics and other valuables could be in the area.
“The bad part about it is, is that when your opportunist criminal comes over and has a good score at one location, that opportunist criminal’s going to come back again and again and again because they did score,” Bowling said.
Another factor that leaves off-campus students susceptible to crime is the communal style of living, Bowling said. Safety measures — such as making sure the last roommate home locks the door — can fall to the wayside, he said, but these measures are key to stopping opportunist criminals.
Along Indianola Avenue multiple fraternities, sororities and off-campus housing reside with a majority of the residents being students.
Mackenzie Shanklin|Photo Editor
In Bowling’s experience, the off-campus area has the most people per square mile in the city, and he said that sometimes that area is considered safer because of the amount of people around.
“I hope that at some point in time, some of the safety information is kind of drilling its way through this thought process that, ‘Hey, I’m here on campus, and I’m here to have a good time, I’m here to go to school,’ or your combination thereof, and the idea that you’re not living in utopia, you’re not living in a place that’s 100 percent crime free, but you’re not living in a place that’s so crime ridden that the city has had to do something different or so violent that they’ve had to use some other kind of technology to come in there to cover all of it,” Bowling said.
Fuqua said students in the off-campus area may also be living on their own for the first time, and they might have to learn additional safety measures to keep themselves and their property safe.
“A lot of times, they may not be as aware of their surroundings as we would like them to be, even though I’m sure parents are still begging them, ‘Don’t walk with your phone in your hand, pay attention and lock the doors’ and all these things,” Fuqua said.
“You could say that over and over and over, but yet, we consistently find, for example, when a car’s broken into, we’re like, ‘Well, did you have doors locked?’ They’re like, ‘No,’” he continued. “Or, If they lost a laptop in a theft, we’re like, ‘Where was the laptop?’ ‘Well, I left it accidentally on the seat.’ So even if they lock the door, they’re making themselves a target, because that’s an easy theft for a thief to do.”
How do the calls compare to the rest of the city?
Bowling said Zone 4, which encompasses the off-campus area, Clintonville, the Fifth by Northwest area and Linden — needs the city to pour more resources into it. According to the Columbus Dispatch, Linden, which is less than three miles from Ohio State, had the most homicides in the city at 13 in 2019.
“Oddly enough, during my tenure as the zone four commander, I would have people shot and killed in the Linden area that didn’t result in my phone ringing nearly as much as the person being robbed over on campus did,” Bowling said.
But over the last five years, the amount of 911 calls made from off-campus cruiser districts has generally decreased, starting at just over 43,000 in 2015 and plummeting to 35,478 in 2019 with a spike in 2017 matching the calls in 2015. As of October 2020, there have been just more than 19,000 calls in 2020.
Bowling said he doesn’t necessarily think that is a factor of the area getting safer, but it could be a result of “numbness.”
“If I want to look at a societal aspect right now, I’m still trying to figure this out: ‘I’d rather not call the police and tell them something’s going on. I’d rather stand there with my phone and film it.’ So that’s something that I see way too often out there is two people are knocking the crap out of each other out there, but nobody’s thinking, ‘Hey, we need to break this up or call the police.’ Everybody’s thinking, ‘Hey, let me film this,’” Bowling said.
Columbus receives about 1 million 911 calls per year, Fuqua said, making the yearly average of calls from the off-campus area just a fraction of the city’s total calls.
Fuqua also said the area could be underreported because students don’t know what to do when something happens.
“They may not even know that they can call the police and have a report documented,” Fuqua said. “If they have roommates, and they live with people, sometimes they’ll convince them like, ‘It’s not even that serious,’ or they have a class to get to, so they go, ‘I don’t have time.’”
Bowling also said that despite calling 911, some people off campus don’t follow through with filing reports, so not all crime is reported. For example, some people may be of the mentality that there’s no point in filing a report if their items are gone or that their insurance will cover it, he said.
Rincón said she did not file a police report, but despite her experience, her view on off-campus safety only changed in terms of location and wanting more students nearby.
“Especially just living as far off as I did, I was like, ‘I’m never living this far off again.’ We were looking at places to live in the next year and I was like, ‘We have to be closer,’ like I’m not living this far off campus,” Rincón said.
A majority of off-campus crime happens on the east side of High Street just outside of campus.
Mackenzie Shanklin|Photo Editor
An analysis of 2,500 mapped addresses that made the most calls to 911 in the off-campus residential area shows a concentration of calls come from the stretch of High Street that divides Ohio State’s campus and the residential area. More calls come from east of High Street — where many students live — and calls increase closer to downtown Columbus.
Fuqua said the increase in calls toward the downtown area is because it is also a transient part of the city; people are often moving through the area for work or travel.
“There are so many people that are in and out, and most of these crimes we’re referring to is what we consider, what we call a crime of opportunity — just meaning people may not necessarily go somewhere thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to break into a car and steal something,’ but they have a criminal record or criminal past where they’re always looking or something comes up, they’re going to take that crime of opportunity in hand,” Fuqua said.
A large number of calls — 11,828 — came in between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., which Fuqua said wasn’t surprising and isn’t unique to the off-campus neighborhoods. This rings true across the city because this time provides the cover of night for crimes of opportunity and fewer witnesses.
How can students stay safe?
Though crime is never the fault of the victim, students can take steps to stay safe while living off campus, Fuqua and Bowling said.
Students should always be aware of their surroundings while walking and they should never leave valuables in cars, Fuqua said.
Bowling said the key to remaining safe is risk management. Managing risks includes locking doors, making arrangements with roommates on who’s going to be in charge of locking doors, not leaving electronics inside vehicles or in plain view, among other things, Bowling said.
“That’s what you’re trying to do right now, is manage your risk while being here in the University District and attending classes,” Bowling said. “Think about what you’re doing, and does it increase or decrease the risk that you might be victimized?”
After being the victims of crime themselves, both Rincón and Montgomery said they have changed their routines as a result of their brushes with off-campus crime.
“Initially when I moved into my new apartment just a couple days later, I was just on alert in every respect. I think no matter where I was, and definitely now, I don’t leave anything in my vehicle,” Montgomery said.
Rincón said her feelings toward safety changed, too.
“It did definitely shake my sense of security. Until it really happens to you, you don’t think anything bad is gonna happen,” Rincón said. “It makes me realize that I always have to be aware of my surroundings and always on guard, especially at night.”
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