<p>S1 attends an urban university. Lately there's been an uptick in student muggings which really concerns me. The rate is about two armed mugging per month. S claims he's being safe but those other kids probably thought that too.</p>
<p>How does this rate compare to your child's urban school?</p>
<p>My D felt safe at George Washington her 4 years there. They talk about how the campus is patrolled by more than the GWU police because of the proximity of government offices. There were a few incidents, and I recall getting e-mails about them from the security office. I don’t remember any armed incidents though.</p>
<p>Our kiddos attend(ed) USoCal. It’s often cited as a VERY DANGEROUS school, but my kids have never told me of any incidents where they felt endangered. They try to follow basic safety precautions–avoid walking alone at night, use Campus Cruiser to drive them home if it’s late, avoid carrying anything that appears valuable (like a purse), etc. Have not heard much about armed muggings on their campus and it is regularly patrolled by campus security, which rapidly responds to calls or if anyone pushes the button on the boxes with the blue light that are on campus and nearby.</p>
<p>You can go to crimereports.com and check the area yourself. I live next to Boston, in between BU & BC, close to Northeastern, MIT, Harvard, Simmons, Wheelock, NEC, Boston Conservator, etc. There are incidents because it’s a city but I would bet the area around most of the schools is as safe as most college towns. We probably have fewer assaults and sexual assaults and those that happen occur mostly in weird hours of the AM in parks where women run alone because they feel safe. </p>
<p>I think that living in a city changes attitudes. Every few years or so, there is a spate of assaults untli that guy is caught somewhere or moves on. Usually in the spring. You become a little more careful but the truth is the area is safe. For example, there were 2 holdups near BU recently, but that area is essentially Cottage Farm, which is one of the nicest neighborhoods you can picture. Same guys did them, no one harmed. So the BU and Brookline police are blanketing the area. </p>
<p>I lived in Ann Arbor and there was more crime around the Michigan campus.</p>
<p>I had two kids spend a total of eight academic years and four summers at the University of Chicago. They grew up in the city and had gone to high school in a “bad” neighborhood, so they didn’t feel uncomfortable in Chicago generally, and certainly not in Hyde Park, which was a lot like neighborhoods where they spent time at home. They went all over the city, on foot and on public transportation, at all hours of the day and night. At one point, my daughter had radio shows at times like 2:00 am and 4:30 am, and she would walk a mile or so, alone, through the city, coming and going from the station. As far as I know, neither of them ever made any use of escort or ride services. I am sure they were sometimes less than sober.</p>
<p>My daughter never had any problems – nothing stolen, never accosted. Her brother had a couple of incidents. He was pickpocketed one afternoon by a young kid at an El station not on campus, realized immediately what had happened, and chased the kid until he got his wallet back (minus the $20 that had been in it). The police told him he was a moron and never to do that again. He was with a group of friends at the time. More seriously, one summer he was walking back to his apartment from campus late at night, alone, and four or five teenagers came up from behind him, knocked him down, and took his wallet and iPod. No serious injury, but definitely scary. He had been walking on a major street with good lighting, but at 1:30 am in August there was no one around. (He was also, I suspect, listening to his iPod while he walked, which he knew was a bad idea.) After that, he took the bus home for a while if he was going to be travelling that late, but eventually he went back to walking.</p>
<p>By contrast, he had a fairly serious athletic injury that required a number of hours in the emergency room, minor surgery, and some permanent loss of flexibility in one hand. Sports was a lot more dangerous than the neighborhood.</p>
<p>By and large, among their friends, there were a couple of other people who got mugged once, and a bicycle stolen, but most of the bad things that happened to them had nothing to do with where their college was and everything to do with being 20 and not always making wise choices. Frankly, I worried less about them taking the El to attend a concert in downtown Chicago than I would have if they were “butt-chugging” at a fraternity house somewhere in a neighborhood with no urban threats.</p>
<p>My son’s urban university has a lot of robberies. If there are more than two in a night, campus security will send out text alerts. A few of his friends have been robbed. I don’t think he’d admit if he has been robbed, for fear that I’d make him move home. I voiced my concern to campus security and they did offer a safety class for students (not sure how many students attended) . Most of this university’s students come from small towns and rural areas and really have to learn street smarts pretty fast.</p>
<p>I’ve been hearing that there has been a surge in smartphone robberies lately. I’d imagine there are a lot of kids wandering down the street with their faces buried in their phones…easy targets.</p>
<p>College campuses in general seem to attract a lot of thieves, because of the influx of students from very low crime places who are used to leaving doors and windows unlocked and otherwise not taking basic security precautions.</p>
<p>In many cases, the highest risk of violent crime around college campuses occurs at parties where large amounts of alcohol is consumed.</p>
<p>Agreed. Criminals aren’t stupid. College students make easy targets because they are almost guaranteed to have smartphones/tablets/laptops and don’t often have the street smarts older people do.</p>
<p>The biggest risk by far is from their fellow students. Rapes, sexual assaults, assaults, burglary, and the occasional murder.</p>
<p>^mini, are you talking about frequency (e.g. how many robberies versus how many rapes) or severity (e.g., rape is much more harmful than robbery even if there are many fewer rapes than robberies)? If it is the former, is your assertion documented?</p>
<p>My D goes to school in an urban area with lots of schools – near her school, some areas are dodgy, some are really unsafe, and some are very safe (remarkably, all are in 15 or 20 minutes walking distance). She gets occasional emails from her school re security issues – females from who were punched and cell phones/purses were stolen – and I think recently they told people not to walk around listening to music. She lives in a neighborhood thought to be super-safe but does have to walk or subway home. This is new, so this thread reminds me to ask how she is handling things at night.</p>
<p>JHS, things are a LOT safer around the U of C than they used to be. When I was there, no female in her right mind would walk alone in the wee hours of the morning. The one friend I had who did it ONCE was jumped in her doorway. She refused to stop screaming, despite the threats of the attacker, and he ran away. Another person I knew had been with a group of about 5 m/f friends walking home to their apartment one evening after an trip to Mr. G’s. A pack of youths grabbed her and started punching her in the face until her friends all handed over their wallets. Her jaw was broken. One of my apartment-mates drove another to the post office south of the Midway to pick up a package. In broad daylight. While he was waiting in his car outside the post office, he felt it rocking. He realized that a kid was slashing his back tires. When she emerged, he drove out of there on the rims. At the time, it was said that the U of C security guys refused to patrol south of the midway, although there was at least one dorm and several graduate facilities there. My sister lived in Kenwood, and she was robbed at least once, with several attempts. (Luckily, they had a really good alarm system…) </p>
<p>Frankly, sometimes it seemed like Hyde Park was a game preserve, and we were the game.</p>
<p>In contract, when a graduate student was killed several years ago, everyone was shocked because violent crime had become comparatively rare.</p>
<p>In light of the recent tragic death at NU (though no foul play appears to be involved), and because we are always saying “be aware of your surroundings” to S, H and I were commenting that probably the safest place from the perspective of avoiding a violent crime would be to live in the fraternity house /quad. Someone up to no good and looking to mug students isn’t apt to choose a place where you’ve got a bunch of guys who will look out for one another. Probably safer than his current dorm.</p>
<p>My D’s urban campus butts up against a dodgy neighborhood, so there are very scary incidents nearby but very few on the campus, and fewer involving students. I think there is a very strong campus security presence and the students feel safe.</p>
<p>Consolation- agree about UChicago. When I was in law school there in the 70s you always called for a security escort after about 9pm and there were a number of fairly serious incidents. It’s much better now.</p>
<p>Kids went to school in an urban environment. There was a home invasion two blocks from their apartment where two occupants were killed. There’s all kinds of nutty crime in the city and you have a fair number of sex offenders in the area because it’s cheap to live there. The local paper has long reader comments on these topics right now: Gangs in the 90s, crime stories as remembered by residents. There are some areas in the city where they get regular bank robberies and holdups. A subway shop that has had several people killed and many more injured over a period of several years. Murders by teenagers that seem to have no sense of the value of life. Gangbangers that like to shoot off guns for fun.</p>
<p>There were a number of muggins on a dark bridge that connected two campuses. The problem was fixed by adding lighting and call-boxes and cameras on the bridge. This was done by the university as the city didn’t have the money to pay for the security measures. There’s all kinds of stupid property crime too - people smashing car windows to grab stuff visible in cars, along with the usual vandalism of cars and buildings.</p>
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<p>Except that fraternity houses tend to have frequent parties with lots of alcohol, resulting in higher frequency of incidents like fights (or worse).</p>
<p>That and drunk people make easier targets, both in the house and while walking home.</p>
<p>Yeah, well, S’s fraternity isn’t Animal House, so I’m not worried at all. Fights -puh-lease, I don’t think so.</p>
<p>There is often a perception/reality divide. When my wife decided to go to law school at Penn, we were living in Palo Alto. One of our friends in California had graduated from Penn two years before and was, in fact, the son of a famous Penn professor, so he had effectively grown up there, although his house was in the suburbs. His description of the safety issues on and around the Penn campus bore absolutely no relationship to the reality we saw when she moved to Philadelphia. His perception was that of a scared 18-year-old, and he had never grown out of it (and had never lived far enough from campus to experience what life was really like off the campus map). We lived in the area near Penn for 13 years, through the height of the crack epidemic, so we had a pretty accurate sense of how dangerous it was and wasn’t – and at its worst it was never a quarter as bad as our friend the Penn alumnus thought.</p>
<p>Chicago – yes, things have clearly gotten a lot better since the 70s and early 80s. But even then, when the graduate student was killed by a mugger a few years ago – and by the way the killer was arrested within the week; he was off the charts enough to be easy to catch, and he didn’t live anywhere near Hyde Park – there was lots of press about previous violent deaths on and near campus, and no one had actually been killed in street violence since the 60s. Of course, the lack of killings didn’t mean people didn’t get mugged or even raped, but it did mean that the level of violence was much lower even then than many people imagined.</p>