<p>Is violent “street crime” really the predominant kind of crime at residential colleges? Or is it more common for rapes to occur where alcohol flows<em>, alcohol-fuelled fights (assault and battery)</em>, and lots of theft from naive students who do not have the habit of locking their dorm rooms, bicycles, etc.?</p>
<p>*where the suspects are other students</p>
<p>Parent1337, you’re accusing ME of fun with statistics? Sure – if your child had gone to Liberia a year ago, there’s a relatively small chance that he or she would have died (yet) from ebola, and a somewhat less small chance that he or she would have gotten seriously ill from the disease. But in large part that’s because the disease only started spreading to populated areas of the country a few months ago. If you project out current infection and death rates over the next year, I think you would conclude that going to Liberia is significantly riskier than going to Urbana.</p>
<p>As for the “12 gang assaults” this month, I didn’t see any source for that, but it doesn’t matter, I’ll trust you. What that means to me as a parent and as a sometime resident of university neighborhoods is that there is a specific group of thugs having a spree, and that’s something the police are usually good at dealing with. It’s really hard to prevent occasional, random muggings, but if you can identify a group and get them off the street, that’s really effective to lower the crime rate.</p>
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<p>@gouf78 I think it’s a good thing to pay attention to one’s gut feelings in cases like these. The book The Gift of Fear talks about that.</p>
<p>NewHavenCTMom’s daughter goes to Yale. They live in New Haven as her moniker indicates. I don’t know why New Haven continues to get a bad rap. Columbia is in NYC for goodness sake. Harvard is in Boston, well Cambridge to be exact. UPENN is in Philadelphia. None of these cities are known to be crime free. I went to Yale after growing up in DC. My D goes there now as a freshman, after going to school in DC her whole life. What is so dangerous about New Haven that this description sticks year after year? I’ve been on campus 5 times in the last few months and there are security personnel everywhere. This is in addition to the 75+ Yale sworn police officers. They are there for assistance, not to make the campus a fortress against the outside world.</p>
<p>Students have no need to go wandering through the “mean” streets of New Haven, just like Georgetown University students don’t go wandering through the bad areas of DC. I love the analogies about feeling unsafe in rural areas. As a female, dark, lonely deserted areas are not places I want to be. And, In Cold Blood was the first true crime book I ever read and has led me to my career in Criminal Justice!!</p>
<p>You can make the argument that “home” is unsafe because people have falls, burn their homes down, etc etc. Sure you can have a tragedy anywhere, but that doesn’t mean sending a kid to an unsafe campus is just as bad as keeping them at home or sending them to a safer campus. You can mitigate some risks, you certainly can’t mitigate all of them. </p>
<p>“Harvard is in Boston, well Cambridge to be exact. UPENN is in Philadelphia. None of these cities are known to be crime free. I went to Yale after growing up in DC. My D goes there now as a freshman, after going to school in DC her whole life. What is so dangerous about New Haven that this description sticks year after year?”</p>
<p>Honestly? I think it’s that New Haven isn’t really “known” as a city outside of Yale, or at least it isn’t to those of us who aren’t within spitting distance of it. So the one thing, after “home of Yale,” that sticks with us is “some level of urban danger.” I don’t have much to replace it with beyond that, because it’s a city that if it weren’t for Yale, wouldn’t be on my radar screen for much of anything.</p>
<p>There are a lot of “most dangerous college” or “college town” lists out there and from the dozen or so I’ve seen, not a lot of overlap, perhaps due to methodology. Do you use Clery data for on-campus crime? State or other local crime data for the area around the campus? Count burglary and such as well as murder/assault?</p>
<p>Vanderbilt, Duke, Berkeley and UCLA seem to appear a lot on certain lists, as well as MIT, Penn, Brown. And a lot of state campuses (South Alabama? New Mexico State? Ball State?)</p>
<p>Seems hard to get a consensus on which ones are actually dangerous and which aren’t. One list I saw had Amherst at #2.</p>
<p>The dangers aren’t weighted. So you- the parent- don’t have the luxury of comparing a campus where several sexual assaults took place in a frat house by members of a sports team and say to yourself, “This danger doesn’t bother me since my 180 lb. son who is a competitive debater and chess player is unlikely to be the victim of a sexual assault at a frat party”.</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl </p>
<p>I think that can be said for many cities/towns. If it weren’t for a particular institution/company/land mark, it would be an anonymous place. </p>
<p>If the strip weren’t there, would the masses be flocking to Vegas?
Would Hanover, NH be on the map without Dartmouth?
Or what about the Kissimee/Orlando area?
What about Philly? What would it be without good ole Ben Franklin.</p>
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<p>The fifth most populous city in the country? Sixth most populous MSA? Birthplace of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the American flag? Not New York?</p>
<p>The thing about New Haven – for those of you who have never been there – is that it is a pretty typical small city in the Northeast in decline, and not unlike its Connecticut siblings Bridgeport (which is in worse shape) and Hartford (which is in bad but not quite as bad shape). There used to be a vibrant business district, with many local successful companies, and lots of manufacturing and shipping. Now, not so much. The manufacturing is almost gone, finance consists of moribund branch offices of mega-institutions elsewhere, and the shipping faces significant competition everywhere, and I think it’s not fully modernized. Affluent people moved out of the city generations ago, except for a few neighborhoods northeast of Yale, and some redevelopment around the university. Yale is cheek-by-jowl with downtown New Haven, but actually much bigger and sprawlier, so with a moribund, hollowed-out central business district and all the recent expansion and construction at Yale, Yale dominates central New Haven physically and economically more than it ever has, and the contrast between the affluence of Yale and the poverty of New Haven is sharper than it has ever been. </p>
<p>The residential areas to the west and south of the university are mainly impoverished and mainly nonwhite, and to the southeast there is something of a mixture of incomes and races, including the remnants of a working-class Italian neighborhood, not unlike much of western Brooklyn before that became the new Manhattan. Overall, it’s the kind of situation that ensures there will be lots of crime near the university, much of it involving no one from the university at all, but if you are there and walking around outside of the Yale campus you can’t help but notice there are a lot of poor- and hungry-looking people of color around, and lots of buildings that are empty and/or not maintained. It doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy, although how dangerous you think it feels depends a lot on exactly where you are and what your expectations are.</p>
<p>But New Haven isn’t Hanover NH. Hanover NH is a little college town; there was never anything much there but Dartmouth. New Haven is the remnant of what was once a significant city regardless of Yale.</p>
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The crime rate in our neighborhood looks really bad right now because one house got broken into five times last summer. It turned out to be one guy on probation. He’s back behind bars. I’m not too worried about copycats.</p>
<p>You’ve got to be kidding, NewHavenCT, with your analogies.</p>
<p>Philadelphia is a major city - one of the largest in the country.<br>
Las Vegas and Orlando are major national and international tourist destinations.
All three of those fall under the classification of “cities that any reasonable adult should have a general sense about.”</p>
<p>As for Hanover and New Haven? </p>
<p>Hanover is not even on the map <em>with</em> Dartmouth. There’s absolutely no reason for anyone not connected with Dartmouth to have heard the name of the town or pay even the slightest bit of attention to it.</p>
<p>As for New Haven - sorry, I stand by what I said. It’s just not important enough of a city to warrant awareness outside its own region. There’s no more reason for anyone outside the NE to have an “impression” of New Haven as there is for anyone outside the state of Illinois to have an “impression” of Peoria or Springfield, IL, which are comparably-sized cities.</p>
<p>I swear, people on CC have got to get over the presumption that what looms large in their backyard has to be important or noteworthy to people everywhere. </p>
<p>New Haven has one of the highest crime and murder rates per capita in the US. New York City, on the other hand has one of the lowest crime rates for a major city. Columbia also generally has annually the lowest crime rate in the ivy league. </p>
<p>I guess we can let this rest. I don’t know of any students that have been assaulted or robbed walking around New Haven. But, again, the good thing about this forum (and America as a whole) is that we can agree to disagree. There are some towns that, on our college tour, I would not have let my child stay in for all the money in the world because they seemed economically depressed and very insular. You may see them differently - as quaint New England towns but the stares we got just riding through town gave my usually clueless child the creeps.</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl - there really is no reason for people outside of the area to have any knowledge of New Haven. But when people constantly bash a particular town, for whatever reason, their opinions become reality. That’s like if someone constantly keeps saying that Southern schools are not diverse or not welcoming to minorities, someone may take that as truth when we all know that is not necessarily the case. Now I am done.</p>
<p>I didnt think you would get so offended! No need for the boxing gloves or to hop into the ring. @Pizzagirl, we can agree to disagree. It’s OK for me to have differing views. </p>
<p>@Pizzagirl as I said upthread, I have a kid at Yale, and I’ve had more than my share of comments from church friends, other parents, relatives, about New Haven, so it certainly is on some people’s radar, not just CC folk. Somehow it has become the poster child of “declining, failing city” something like Detroit or Gary lately. Some people know that it is not what it was in the 80s (in a good way) but many have that image still. </p>
<p>NewHavenCT - it’s not that I really have an opinion one way or the other on New Haven. (And yes, I’ve been there, several times.) I’m just saying that there’s nothing else to project onto it.</p>
<p>Yale is the largest employer in the state of Connecticut, and the investment the university is making in life sciences and technology is likely the biggest infusion of capital in recent memory in the region. Unlike the local hedge funds (they can have billions of dollars under management with only a few hundred employees), a university is a labor intensive enterprise. </p>
<p>It’s fine for folks outside of the Northeast not to have heard of New Haven and frankly it doesn’t matter. But Yale’s strategic plan and its footprint in New England goes well beyond having a few thousand undergraduates and some old dorms and a bunch of old books in its various libraries and museums. It’s not just New England- there are old manufacturing towns outside of the region whose primary industry (firearms and defense in the case of New Haven but it could apply to textiles or shoes or appliance manufacturing in dozens of Southern cities) has gone… but the economic vitality is on the upswing.</p>
<p>There are delegations showing up in New Haven all the time from outside New England trying to figure out if their own economic development teams can learn from what Yale is doing. It helps to have a large teaching hospital and prominent med school at the core-- but even cities without that are trying to adapt the New Haven model.</p>
<p>So while the “man on the street” may not be aware of New Haven, there are labor economists and urban planners and genetics researchers and grant writers and foundations all of whom are very keyed in to the urban renewal going on in New Haven.</p>
<p>Ask the head of your local Economic Development team of your own municipality or region and they can probably spout statistics that will make your head explode.</p>
<p>And now that the bloom is off the casino gambling “fix” for every depressed region in the country… nice that a city is trying something a little more socially useful (advanced cancer research or slot machines… hmmmm. which has a bigger impact on a community?)</p>
<p>I’m with you there! The casino gambling “fix” depresses the heck out of me.</p>