Urban Atlanta colleges tackle safety risks

It was after 11 p.m. as Georgia Tech sophomore Mohammed Washim and a friend finished a school project and left the library.

Construction work closed a main walkway, so the two took the detour. A hooded man with a handgun appeared from behind. “You’re being robbed,” he said. He ordered them to place their bookbags and wallets on the ground and walk away.

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Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com

Georgia State University officers patrol the urban campus along Courtland Street in downtown Atlanta. Students in the heart of a major city often learn to become wary of possible crime.

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Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com

Georgia State senior Abegail Fearon of Loganville talks to a fellow student as the GSU Crime Suppression Team is shown in the background in front of the general classroom building on Peachtree Center Avenue.

How we got this story
This story was developed through interviews with students, crime victims and police and safety officials at metro campuses, by checking statistics provided by the schools to the U.S. Department of Education and through reports about recent crime incidents on the campuses and off.

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It was a good haul for five minutes’ work, according to the police reports: two laptops, two calculators, an iPod, a cellphone, a stack of credit cards.

“He seemed like an experienced robber to us,” Washim, a native of Cambridge, Mass., recalled. “He was very efficient. This wasn’t his first time.”

The March 30 incident was one of five times that Georgia Tech students were robbed at gunpoint in a two-week period. The crimes — it is not known how many were connected — were unusual in their frequency but not in occurrence. After all, institutions like Georgia Tech, Georgia State University and the Atlanta University Center are all near high-crime areas.

That fact came alive again this month when a Georgia Tech student was shot during a carjacking and a Georgia State student was shot during a kidnapping, probably by the same three criminals. Both men survived. While the events did not occur on campus and were not school-related, they indicate students in urban settings are often targeted by criminals.

“College students make for ready victims,” said Volkan Topalli, a Georgia State criminologist and an expert on street crime and carjacking. “Look at where Georgia State is situated, and Georgia Tech. Same with Morehouse [and other colleges in the complex like Clark Atlanta and Spelman]. There’s a population of offenders in those neighborhoods nearby who are looking for people to victimize. If you have city campuses, you have an available, consistent pool of victims.”

Students are young, often naive and impetuous. They don’t keep regular hours and often lack street smarts.

College administrators and police forces know this. They also know a safe environment is key to parents sending their children to those institutions.

Part of the solution is policing the campuses. Georgia Tech has 71 sworn officers and Georgia State has 66 patrolling by car, foot, bike and even Segway. Their job — like cops anywhere — is to make arrests, respond to calls and generally make their presence known.

But they can’t be everywhere: Their jurisdiction ends 500 feet outside the campuses, an area patrolled by an understaffed Atlanta police force. Of the five robberies in March of Georgia Tech students, three were in Atlanta police jurisdiction.

Statistics provided by the schools to the U.S. Department of Education indicate the campuses are relatively safe: Tech reported five violent crimes on campus in 2007, the last year figures are listed in a crime accounting system mandated by federal law. Georgia State reported 15, Morehouse three and Clark Atlanta three.

But trying to calculate the number of crimes occurring to students off campus is like putting your thumb on Jell-O. The figures are maintained by other police agencies and a victim’s connection to a school is often not mentioned in a police report.

Also, the figures are not consistent. On its Web site, Georgia Tech says 15 violent school-related crimes occurred in 2006. But the Department of Education’s Web site reports three violent crimes on Georgian Tech’s campus that year, two in residence halls and seven near campus.

Educating new students on the city’s landscape is key to helping them make smart decisions, said Georgia Tech Police Chief Teresa Crocker. A lot of the advice given out by the colleges is no-brainer common sense: walk in pairs, be aware of surroundings, don’t keep valuables in parked cars, don’t be distracted by talking on cellphones when walking into parking garages. But young people, even smart ones like engineering students, don’t always think of such things.

“Many students at Georgia Tech come from rural areas where they maybe didn’t lock their car doors or maybe even their doors to their homes,” the chief said. Adding to this challenge, she said, is each year brings a new crop of freshmen to indoctrinate.

Atlanta police Major Khirus Williams, commander of Zone 5 that includes Tech and GSU, said he and Tech officials next fall will start a safety orientation aimed students.

Williams said criminals don’t necessarily target college students. “The perpetrators are victimizing people they have an opportunity to victimize,” he said.

Michael Lacour, a Clark Atlanta vice president, said the school is in the midst of neighborhoods “not necessarily pristine and suburban.” Students, 72 percent of whom are women, are often reminded of that fact.

In 2007, Georgia State’s police department responded to the opening of its new dorms with “Operation Clean Sweep,” which targeted street-level crime, especially at a city park nearby. “Arrests went up, and then they went down, which is what you want,” said Carlton Mullis, deputy police chief at GSU.

This fall, Georgia State will open a freshman dorm nearby on Edgewood Street. That will increase pedestrian traffic — and the areas that need to be patrolled.

“There’s a displacement theory,” Mullis said. “If Georgia State students are out on the street, it replaces vagrants.”

“Our biggest problem is petty theft — book bag thefts, cellphone thefts, laptop thefts,” he said.

Most buildings are open and can be entered by non-students. This month, police found a man bathing in a bathroom at the Arts and Humanities building and issued him a written warning. Mullins said the GSU population is told, “If they don’t look like they should be there, give us a call.”

Carsten Singh, the Georgia State student abducted at an off-campus parking garage and shot in the leg earlier this month, said, “Going to classes, you have a sense that you’re safe, that nothing bad will happen to you; there are a lot of Georgia State police.”

He is recovering but not sure he’ll return to finish his degree in Atlanta. “The normal life I had before is destroyed,” he said. “It

really messes things up.”