<p>If you want to size up the security situation around NU, part of which IS, indeed, IN Roxbury, check out the Crime Log on The</a> Huntington News, BPDNews.com</a> - News Updates from the Boston Police Department and Boston</a> Crime Map - Showing Crime in Boston, MA - Crime Statistics - Crime Alerts - Crime Stops Here.</p>
<p>In my most honest opinion, it is not a very safe area, and in the vicinities of Ruggles, Columbus Ave., Tremont St. and Mission Hill (esp. Back of the Hill and Parker Hill Ave.), it's not even a kind-of safe area. NU students are assaulted and even murdered with a disturbing regularity that nearby schools simply don't match. Run a search on student deaths in the online archives of the student paper. All those pretty new high-rise dorms, the ones they put smack-dab in the middle of several absolutely hellish housing projects? On quite a few occasions, students have returned home to find homeless vagrants sleeping on their couches. Sophomore year, my roommates and I had an armed invasion and robbery at our townhouse, just a stone's throw away from campus--and NUPD headquarters. That's in the Crime Log, too. </p>
<p>During that same year that I lived at that address, someone was shot in the face at a barber shop about 50' away from my door, a dead body was found about 30' in the other direction (not the last one to be found in that same spot), and I witnessed a man on a bicycle ride by and shoot another. </p>
<p>A few years ago, an unidentified gang broke into the Hemenway Street apartment of a criminal justice major who dealt drugs. They tied up his roommates, and tied the FBI Agency-hopeful to a chair. They shot him in his leg and his abdomen. He died. His murder is neither the first, nor the only, nor the most recent violent death or life-threatening attack on a student on or near campus. Good Lord, not by a long shot.<br>
(Family</a> seeks answers in student's '03 death - The Boston Globe)</p>
<p>Rape, too. Late at night about a year ago, a female student who had been visiting a friend hailed a cab on Hemenway Street to take her home. The cab driver drove her all the way to the North Shore, and raped her. Fortunately, a cop pulled the cab over on Route 1 in Saugus, and she was rescued. Go ahead, look it up. </p>
<p>The student who was shot to death in her Mission Hill apartment relatively recently wasn't so lucky. Loads of neighbors in her building later told investigators that they'd heard the gunshots, but no one called 9-11. A maintenance man discovered her door open the next morning, and found her laying dead in a pool of blood. </p>
<p>Don't count on NUPD or BPD, both are notoriously lazy and apathetic. People "ooh" and "ahh" at NUPD because the department is one of the few campus forces in Boston that is actually armed. But if they catch your carrying pepper spray for personal protection, you'll probably get fined. Such things require a firearms permit in Massachusetts. And the Allied Security guards? They just laughed and waved me on that night my friend and I decided to steal a new beer pong table from the student center. :) </p>
<p>I feel like I could go on and on with the news stories and personal anecdotes. I posted this because I saw a lot of blissful ignorance on this board with respect to the area's safety. As someone who has been in the NU area full-time since 2005, and more recently, near BU in Brookline and Allston, I can say with certainty that the NU neighborhood is not nearly as safe as some seem to think. And I'm from Baltimore.</p>