The blue-lit emergency phones around campus will soon be at an El station and street near you.
Evanston City Council passed a bill Monday night to install nine emergency call boxes throughout the city for public use.
“Obviously this is about the attempt to improve safety and security for members of our NU community as well as members of the Evanston community,” said Alan Cubbage, Northwestern’s vice president for university relations.
A joint effort between NU students and administrators and the City Council, the idea was initially proposed in 2005 by former Associated Student Government President Patrick Keenan-Devlin, Music ’06.
“We had actually been thinking about it as well, but (Keenan-Devlin) crystallized it with the fellow members of the (student budget advisory) committee, in so suggesting that we put more phones on the west side of Sheridan Road and in locations that were more expansive, not just land we owned,” said Eugene Sunshine, NU’s senior vice president for business and finance.
Keenan-Devlin, who attended Monday night’s council meeting and who now works in downtown Chicago, said he was ecstatic to hear about the bill’s passing.
“If you talk to the chief of the NU police force, you would hear from him that these emergency phones serve two functions: First, they serve as a crime deterrent and, second, they serve as an easy means for people to notify emergency services when there is an actual emergency,” Keenan-Devlin said. “Evanston was claiming that there were a lot of crime incidents by the El stations when we started the initiative in 2004, and so we thought that this would be a great project for NU and the city to work on together to make the El platforms safer not only for students but Evanston residents (also).”
No timeline for the installation was discussed at Monday night’s meeting or in city documents.
While boxes on campus dial directly to NU police, any calls made from the Evanston boxes will be transferred to the Evanston Police Department. The emergency box on Simpson Street and Maple Avenue will be located about a block away from where an NU student was sexually assaulted last spring.
NU will provide the funding for the boxes and their installations, which should cost $82,000, and after they are installed, the city will be financially responsible for their maintenance. There are dozens of emergency phones on campus, and they experience very few prank calls, according to a city memorandum.
This is one of the first in what NU administrators hope to be a series of collaborative efforts between NU and Evanston, Sunshine said.
“It’s a new relationship for us, which is one of the reasons it took longer,” he said. “These are emergency phones and emergency lighting that are being put in by the university at our expense but being put in on city land. We have not done that before, and we are doing it because we think it is very valuable for our constituency, faculty, staff and students.”
Keenan-Devlin said he was shocked to hear of the bill’s passing because of the notoriously tense relationship between NU and Evanston.
“If Evanston residents and NU students can come together and are committed to bulldozing the political tensions between the NU administration and City Council, I think a lot can be accomplished,” he said.
Though Weinberg freshmen Allyson Westling and Rachel Bencic do not go into Chicago often, both said they heard that the El stations get “sketchy” after 1 a.m., and believe safety should be addressed outside of campus.
“I think (safety) is an issue, and I think the phones could be helpful,” Westling said. “It’s good to have a back-up, and it would be more of an added sense of security that they are there.”
The Daily’s Tommy Giglio contributed to this report.
Reach Corinne Lestch at [email protected].
