Is this normal?

Colleges & Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
1

Since September 12th, I have received 20 emails from UCPD about incidents on and around campus:

  1. 9/12/16 - Aggravated Assault and Robbery
  2. 9/12/16 - Sexual Assault at a concert
  3. 9/12/16 - Sexual Assault at a concert x2
  4. 9/12/16 - Sexual Assault at a concert x3
  5. 9/15/16 - Sexual Assault in a residence hall
  6. 9/20/16 - Assault with a Deadly Weapon
  7. 9/20/16 - Sexual Assault in a residence hall
  8. 9/22/16 - Attempted Armed Robbery
  9. 9/22/16 - Armed Robbery
  10. 10/1/16 - Attempted Robbery (victim got beaten with brass knuckles)
  11. 10/9/16 - Robbery via Simulated Firearm
  12. 10/9/16 - Armed Robbery
  13. 10/9/16 - Armed Robbery x2
  14. 10/10/16 - Stalking (a 17 year old girl and her 4 year old brother were followed by a dude in a black van)
  15. 10/11/16 - Armed Robbery
  16. 10/11/16 - Armed Robbery x2
  17. 10/12/16 - Armed Robbery
  18. 10/12/16 - Armed Robbery x2
  19. 10/13/16 - Attempted Armed Robbery
  20. 10/16/16 - Shooting Investigation (a 35 year old man was shot in the middle of the street)

That’s 20 incidents in 34 days. Is this normal for Berkeley or is this a recent uptick? This is much worse than I expected it to be. I’ve lived in college towns before and I can’t remember a single one with this many incidents in such a short period of time.

2
  1. Did you receive daily updates from the local and campus police departments in those other college towns? If not, there may have been many incidents there that you did not hear about.
  2. The city of Berkeley does have a higher crime rate than typical in California.
  3. New students arriving on campus for the first time may be naive about crime, and therefore be easier victims.
3

@ucbalumnus When I lived in Cambridge, I did receive updates from the Harvard emergency service. I lived there for 4 months and received less than 10 messages. Many of them were not crime-related, but about fires and similar such emergencies.

I received another one just after posting this: Strong-Arm Robbery of a woman unaffiliated with Berkeley on Bancroft Way, near Zellerbach

And I understand your last point, but I think many of the victims were unaffiliated with the University or older students, although some of these were freshmen.

4

Cambridge has a lower crime rate than Berkeley.

But also realize that different police departments have different thresholds about what alerts to send out.

For example, the alerts sent out by the UCB campus police and the city of Berkeley police are different:

http://local.nixle.com/university-of-california-police-department-berkeley/
http://local.nixle.com/berkeley-police-department/

5

My sister has lived in Berkeley for 20 years and she doesn’t walk in the dark.

6

I get those emails too, @humanperson, and it is concerning to see each of the crimes in one long list. For an overall picture of a University’s crime statistics, I usually turn to the annual report. Cal’s, for 2016, is here, and you can go to page 28 for crime stats going back to 2013: http://ucpd.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/uc-berkeley-annual-security-report_2016.pdf

7

Good ol’ Berkeley! I went to high school there, lived off Telegraph for a few years, then attended Cal as an older student. There is a lot of crime there, but as someone mentioned above, crime stats also depend on how they report it. You have to realize that there are “better” and “worse” parts of the city as far as crime goes. Living in Northside or off campus up toward Berkeley Hills? Not so much crime. There is more crime “Southside”, where the Units are located, because that where there’s more congregating. As you head toward Oakland, crime increases even more (except east of College Ave.) A rough dividing line would be Alcatraz St. – south of that and it’s not so good, but not many students venture there regularly. A lot of criminals are opportunistic in regards to students, so the majority of the time, you can avoid confrontations with just a little street smarts.

Cal students are (increasingly so) very vocal regarding sexual assaults, so I suspect, the stats are not increasing, per se, but are a direct result of more awareness. I highly doubt this differs from any other comparable university in the US.

My D1 is a sophomore at Cal, living in a house with 9 other young women. They use the phone notification system, Bearwalk, etc. and common sense. She walks in the dark just fine. If you’re not used to an economically diverse metropolitan area, then it may seem startling. However, I doubt places like U Chicago, USC, NYU, are much different. As far as on-campus crime goes, places like Claremont Mckenna, Pomona College and Hampshire (in Amherst, Mass) were in the top 25 “most dangerous” colleges (2015) on a % pop basis. Cal wasn’t even on that list.