<p>Son just got accepted off the waitlist for this fall. He is thrilled! I am nervous. Can anyone comment on the police presence, safety precautions and crime in the area? We haven't visited the campus yet, and I haven't been to NOLA in many years. I do know that Tulane is in one of the nicest sections of the city, but I can't help being concerned about his safety. Seems that the crime in NOLA is a major issue.</p>
<p>I started a thread “Tulane and Crime” on March 27 and got great answers and will most likely be attending Tulane. I’m a female and my mom, too, had concerns. I’m going to Dest. Tulane on Thurs.</p>
<p>New Orleans is a fun city. Tulane IS in a nice part of town. Beautiful campus! I’ve visited there many, many times. It gets a bad rep for crime but I think its much worst in LA (UCLA, USC for example). I’ve never had a problem. Of course you’ll need to take the usual precautions like in any big city but a lot of the crime is directed toward tourists around the French Quarter area. The local people are so very friendly. Plus I hear Tulane has good FA.</p>
<p>Google Tulane crime reports. There is good advices from Tulane and the New Orleans Police. They can improve the safety of your S. I am beginning to understand that there are no “totally safe” campus. All of them have a certain amount of crimes. A student needs to be inform of all precautions to take to improve his safety. New Orleans is a city with many problems but there is ways to avoid the risk of a “bad situation”.</p>
<p>Mom2009 - I will repost my comments from the thread c3606 mentions. Keep in mind she was specifically comparing it to a rural school, Elon, and as a female, not for a son:</p>
<p>Let me start by saying I have a daughter that has chosen Tulane and so I take this very seriously. I also attended Tulane in the 1970’s when New Orleans was actually a more dangerous city than it is now, and had zero problems, but I am a male and understand the difference that makes.</p>
<p>Tulane is very open about crimes reported in the area:</p>
<p><a href=“http://tulane.edu/publicsafety/oncampus-crime.cfm[/url]”>http://tulane.edu/publicsafety/oncampus-crime.cfm</a>
<a href=“http://tulane.edu/publicsafety/off-campus-reports.cfm[/url]”>http://tulane.edu/publicsafety/off-campus-reports.cfm</a></p>
<p>The records go back a year at least and as you can see, the vast majority of crimes on campus are theft and drug related, pretty routine for any college campus. There was an increase in the number of rapes and attempted rapes reported (11, I believe, which I found disturbing), some of those involved chose not to officially file. I think there were 5 that were filed cases of rape or sexual assault by an unknown individual. There was an arrest made in late February of a person that might be connected to these incidents. Also, virtually all the incidents were young women alone at very early hours of the morning (1-5 AM). Please read this as just reporting the facts, not to offer a comparison one way or the other. I have done some research of other, similar schools (Vanderbilt, Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, etc. My daughter was not interested in a rural school) but I would hardly call my study exhaustive, that would take more time and resources than I have available. Also most places don’t make it as easy to see what the picture is as Tulane does, or at least I could not find it in most cases. I had to go to non-campus sources and try and narrow it down, and besides most likely missing things, I am sure various incidents are simply not reported at all if the victim chooses not to pursue the matter and does not alert non-campus authorities.</p>
<p>Having said all that, I think like any place, if you use common sense you can take advantage of all that Tulane and New Orleans have to offer and be safe. Security will always escort you if you request it. Be sure to stick with friends, which I imagine would be the case mostly anyway. Take Tulane’s defense class (there was an article in a recent Hullabaloo, the school newspaper, lamenting the lack of participation). Also you probably already know that Tulane is in a very upscale part of New Orleans and the extremely vast majority of crime is elsewhere, highly skewed away from the campus area. Nonetheless crime does occur on and near the Tulane campus, certainly.</p>
<p>I suppose the question would be “Why bother even debating it if I can go to a safer school?” Good question, I certainly won’t argue that there are not safer places than Tulane and New Orleans, although again it stacks up very well against almost every other city based school. It is of course a personal decision, but I would say there are numerous reasons. Elon is a fine school, but Tulane is larger, broader, and more diversified, with a significant Master’s and PhD candidate population and the research that goes with it. This significantly enhances the undergraduate experience for most students, no matter what their area of study, be it science or languages or history. Also, one needs to deal with these realities of life at some point anyway, in most cases. I would argue better to learn it more gradually in the relative safety of a campus like Tulane’s than be thrown into it after getting your first job.</p>
<p>In the end, for us, we felt it made no sense to base such an important decision on a topic that in fact is a pretty tiny factor in the day-to-day life of a Tulane student. These 4 years will affect the rest of her life and be some of her (hopefully) fondest memories. If something were to happen, it would be huge to her and us, of course. But that could happen anywhere. There are rapes and sexual assaults on rural campuses all the time, and heavy drinking and drugs and the associated tragedies that go with them are much higher in these places, because there is less else to do, typically. And who could have predicted Virginia Tech, which is hardly in a high crime area? I know that was not a crime in the same sense we mean here, but just to say things can happen anywhere, and all you can do is take all the precautions you can. [not in original post: There was also the UNC Chapel Hill class president that was abducted and killed in a normally quiet, almost idyllic college town].</p>
<p>Sorry to go on so long, but since this was something I had already looked into fairly extensively, I though I would share my findings and my thoughts. Best of luck with your decision, I hope you are very happy wherever you end up.</p>
<p>Ok, having reposted that, let me add that Tulane has real police as their security, they patrol about 0.5 miles beyond the campus perimeter and work closely with the rest of the NOLA police, they are continuing to add more lighting and other safety features, and that the vast vast majority of violent crime in NOLA is criminal on criminal and well away from the campus. Here is the latest summary report by the university:</p>
<p><a href=“http://tulane.edu/publicsafety/upload/KTC08.pdf[/url]”>http://tulane.edu/publicsafety/upload/KTC08.pdf</a></p>
<p>Bad things can happen anywhere, as we all know and as I gave a couple examples of in my previous post. But with common sense and normal urban precautions, New Orleans and Tulane are incredible places to go to school. I wouldn’t trade those 4 years for anything.</p>
<p>For information on crime on all campuses that report, please see the following government crime statistics site: [Campus</a> Security Data Analysis Cutting Tool Website](<a href=“Campus Safety and Security”>Campus Safety and Security). This ought to help you put some perspective on crime at Tulane vs. college campuses throughout the US.</p>
<p>I only checked out a few schools on this site, but it appeared to me that reported crime at Tulane is about the same as that on any urban campus. As other posters have mentioned, Tulane is a lot more open than other schools in posting their actual crime statistics (here’s a hint: don’t bring an expensive bike!). I am aware that the Tulane police patrol an area with a 2 mile perimeter around campus. Tulane is right on the edge of the Garden District and across from Audubon Park, and the area is very nice. There are some “college housing” type areas nearby (on Broadway and the surrounding streets, where a lot of the frats are located), but nothing too run down. Didn’t see anywhere I would want to live, but college students obviously have lower standards!</p>
<p>We went to Destination Tulane on Saturday 4/18, and that night we took a walk from our downtown hotel and wandered into the French Quarter (it was French Quarter Fest, and it was very crowded). Our son is a pretty straight arrow, though he likes to have fun. So it was sort of funny when we had to keep walking faster because our son could not wait to get the heck out of there. I did ask if he was walking so fast because he was embarassed to be seen with his parents, and he said, “God, no, Mom! It’s because those were ADULTS acting stupid!” Of course, I don’t think he’d ever seen people pushing strollers with infants (yes, at 10 o’clock at night) and downing $2 shots before. </p>
<p>BTW, he did accept the admission offer when we returned home on Sunday.</p>
<p>I have been trying to understand the website “Campus Security Data Analysis Cutting Tool Website”, but it either makes no sense or I am not getting something, especially as regards 2007 data. For a number of schools they report, e.g. 15 incidents in 2006, 17 incidents in 2006, then zero in 2007, and this is pervasive over various schools. I would have thought they just didn’t report 2007 data at all, but there are some numbers in other categories for that same school. It defies all sense that that many schools would have eliminated those offenses completely “overnight”. So while I was excited to see such a resource, I have my doubts about the data integrity.</p>
<p>I will say that 2005 and 2006 look like they make sense, so maybe it is just a time lag (this is the government we are talking about after all) and they haven’t processed all the data for 2007. So if you ignore 2007 and only look at the other years, I completely agree with KYKidsmom’s conclusion. Tulane is no better 
and no worse than other schools of comparable size in comparable settings.</p>
<p>KYKids, as a parent with a student finishing the second year at Tulane, he describes Bourbon Street as a tourist trap offering overpriced drinks to fat middle aged tourists. They go one, they don’t go back. Do they take advantage of the music and all that New Orleans has to offer? Absolutely.</p>
<p>S, a senior would agree with roamingcooks about Bourbon street. However, they do go to other parts of the Quarter.</p>
<p>Here is one picky, little correction to KY’s comment. Tulane is not next to the Garden District. It is in the Uptown/University area, a very gracious part of the city. It is several miles from the Garden District which features many historic homes which date to the ante-bellum period and is quite close to Downtown. Though I have no statistics in front of me, I’d guess that the Garden District has higher level of crime than the area around Tulane.</p>
<p>LOL, I almost wrote the same thing parentstwo, but I got overly concerned with seeming to be too “correcting”. But you are absolutely right, and I have also heard the area where Tulane is referred to as the Audubon District, which makes sense. At least we pretty much used Uptown and Audubon equally when I was there. Both areas are fantastic, my D and I took a long walk through some of the surrounding neighborhoods and then through Audubon Park when we were there for Honors weekend in March, then walked a long way down Magazine Street (after seeing the river of course) and through a lot of the Garden District. It does extend to the edge of downtown, and it also goes a pretty long way up St. Charles, blending into the Audubon District. Not sure where the official dividing line is. Napolean (my guess)? Louisiana? Anyway, it is all just so New Orleans.</p>
<p>I imagine you are right about the crime stats.</p>
<p>As a buddy of mine used to say, “why guess?” 
</p>
<p>I think this is a pretty good map of New Orleans neighborhoods:
<a href=“http://www.gnocdc.org/mapping/docs/neighborhood.pdf[/url]”>http://www.gnocdc.org/mapping/docs/neighborhood.pdf</a></p>
<p>… and the NOPD has excellent tools for exploring crime stats here:
[City</a> of New Orleans - Localized Recovery Information Portal](<a href=“http://cno-gisweb02.cityofno.com/crimemaps/]City”>http://cno-gisweb02.cityofno.com/crimemaps/)</p>
<p>Both put Tulane squarely in the Audobon neighboorhood - I thought of it as Uptown, too.</p>
<p>These definitions are kind of funny, sorry I started this, but thanks for humoring me.</p>
<p>I grew up three blocks from Tulane, in the 14th Ward; it’s part of the 2nd District (police); we all said we lived “uptown,” and still do. Since there is an Audubon Place, Audubon Blvd, Audubon St, and, of course, Audubon Park all within a few blocks of Tulane, you wouldn’t go wrong using the Audubon designation, but I still think most people in the area would call it “Uptown.” And, I’ve usually thought of the Uptown-Garden District boundary being at Louisiana Ave. </p>
<p>BTW, for those not familiar with N.O., uptown means “up river,” and downtown means “down river.” Lake side means “towards Lake Pontchartrain” and River side means “towards the river.” If you ever use cardinal directions, people will not know what you’re talking about.</p>
<p>Go Green Wave!</p>
<p>Ultra cool map, giddey_up. Thanks. Never knew there was technically an Uptown District and an Audubon District, and I know no one ever said anything about a Touro District, just the infirmary. I am choosing to ignore the Touro designation and make that part of the Garden District, call it the Fallenchemist map. And while I am at it we will combine Audubon and Uptown and just call it the Uptown-Audubon District. Much better.</p>
<p>I am not sorry you started it parentstwo. It is fun and informative.</p>