While crime continues to rise in and around the University of Louisville community, students are beginning to feel less safe than ever when simply walking across campus at the wrong hour of the day, or in-less-than-perfect lighting. Students’ safety should have been a priority years ago, with measures being taken to protect us before the present crime wave rolled in.
Should we compile the outrageous number of Rave alerts which students have received in the past three months, this sudden increase in police presence seems alarmingly late and disturbingly unproductive. If it required a student to be stabbed in order to get the attention of university administration, what does that say about the importance of the students who did not receive injuries? Safety should not be so generalized that actual threat of death is the only thing that makes the university act.
While the university assures students that they are taking all possible precautions and that our well-being is of the utmost importance, we simply aren’t buying it. There has been a spike of crime in the past year and the university’s delay in action speaks much louder than their after-the-fact response.
Kenneth Brown, U of L assistant chief of police seems to be under the impression that a rise in heroin could very well be a part of the rise in crime. This assertion seems misinformed when we look at the types of crime reports that have come in. Instead, this seems to be a scapegoat for the fact that our university seems to have higher priorities than safety.
Our safety is not only questionable on the Belknap campus, but also in student neighborhoods, communities around campus and simply the walk to and from our homes . We need a police force that will proactively protect and serve our student body, instead of one that waits for an incident to happen in order to come in for cleanup.
