Downtown students and their expensive electronics provide what Georgia State University’s police chief calls a “target-rich environment” for predators, and predators are working overtime.
On Wednesday around 4 p.m. a thief jerked the iPad out of a GSU student’s hands as he stood in front of the Aderhold Learning Center; another student’s cellphone was snatched Monday afternoon as she walked near the school, bringing robberies of GSU students to five in two weeks. Georgia Tech has been plagued by a rash of similar snatch-and-grab attacks, as well as assaults against four Tech women, including a sexual assault that took place Thursday night.
City and campus police officials said they’re going to great lengths to stem the recent spike in crimes against students — who, they say, often seem to be working in the opposite direction.
A case in point: On Tuesday, after dark, while about 40 undergraduates joined administrators for a “safety walk” around the Georgia Tech campus, an undergraduate strolled past the group with her laptop open, watching the glowing screen in the evening gloom. She was at the very spot where the well-publicized “serial groper” had accosted another female student.
“That’s just self-inflicted,” said student government Vice President Eran Mordel, who helped organize the event.
But Kathy Boehmer, the public safety chair for the nearby Home Park neighborhood, said authorities on and off campus can do more to protect students — even if that means protecting them from themselves.
Students are often “their own worst enemies,” she acknowledged, but “the adult supervision at Tech needs to be more involved.”
Missing lights and inaccessible emergency phones were among the problems students pointed out during the safety walk while administrators took notes.
Nationally, statistics show that campuses are safer than surrounding communities, and that crime on many campuses is down. Locally, numbers have fluctuated in recent years, with some campuses experiencing increases and others decreases. But this fall brought a spike in robberies of students, on and off Atlanta campuses.
In response, the universities have launched a number of efforts to fight back, with tactics both high-tech and old-school.
● Later this month Georgia Tech will roll out the Rave Guardian system, an enhanced caller profile network that allows student cellphones to activate a timer — say, for a walk across campus — and to automatically call campus police if the trip isn’t completed in a prescribed period.
● GSU’s police force added staff last week, said Chief Connie Sampson, to deal with the spike in burglaries. “Since then we’ve made three arrests and we have another one pending,” said Sampson.
● Police at GSU and Clark-Atlanta have also taken a more aggressive stance toward trespassers on school property, stopping more individuals and issuing more citations.
● The police chiefs of universities including Tech, GSU and Clark-Atlanta University meet monthly with the Atlanta Police Department and Midtown Blue to coordinate prevention efforts.
Nevertheless, said Sampson, the first layer of security is the student, and that student is not always on the ball. “We’ve got 32,000 students out in the streets, and 90 percent of them have some kind of smartphone device, and they’re using it out on the street.”
Here’s the underlying problem, said Jimmy Williamson, chief of police at the University of Georgia: “They’re 18, they’re young and invincible, and they don’t think bad things happen to them.”
James Newsome of Warrenton, a Tech alumnus whose daughter is an alumna and a Tech employee, sees another problem. He said he checks in with his daughter after each new incident, and “I don’t hear a thing about what’s being done to minimize those crimes, to add protections to the students.”
Schools receiving federal financing are also required by law to send out “Clery alerts” to students when a crime occurs on campus. The law was passed after Lehigh University freshman Jeanne Ann Clery was raped and murdered in her dorm room in 1986.
One thing the alerts make clear, said Tech student Joey Weaver, 20, is that those who get robbed “were not paying attention to what was going on; they were looking down and texting, or listening to music.”
Weaver, a third-year major in industrial engineering, said the campus is safe, and would be safer if students used common sense. “They tell you in orientation ... be aware of your surroundings.”
In February, Georgia Tech sent valentines to students, ostensibly from potential thieves, that were inscribed: “I only have eyes for you, and your cellphone.” Brett Rogers, a 20-year-old fourth-year student in biomedical engineering, got the message.
Rogers told participants in the campus safety walk of recently rebuffing a man on Luckie Street who asked to borrow his phone. Rogers watched as the man began to trail behind another student, who, deep in a phone conversation, was unaware she was being followed. Rogers ran to keep up.
As the potential thief drew closer to the woman, he looked around to see if anyone was watching. “He looked right in my eyes and I looked straight in his,” said Rogers. Then the man abandoned his plan, crossed the street and took out his own cellphone. “That’s when I called the police,” Rogers said.
By the numbers
Robberies committed against students at Georgia universities fluctuate year to year. The U.S. Department of Education compiled these statistics for 2008, 2009 and 2010. Numbers for this year are not yet available.
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