The e-mail address [email protected] is hard to get used to. Every time it appears in our inboxes, we know something has happened. One such e-mail arrived on Sunday, January 24 at 1:29 a.m. “Three female Northwestern students,” “attempted armed robbery,” “intersection of…” and I froze at the street names listed. That is where I live. A gun was in front of my house, and it was wielded with the intent to intimidate and potentially hurt. I couldn’t move from the turquoise futon in my living room. My eyes flitted around. I irrationally believed someone-maybe even those same two guys-was trying to force his way into my house. I took stock of where my roommates were and where they would have been “at approximately 10:30 p.m.” earlier that night.
I called University Police’s non-emergency line because I felt shocked and helpless, and I needed to feel as though I was doing something. “I’m just kind of frustrated,” I told the patient officer. “Because I feel like everything is happening on my street, and I never see a cop car or officer around here!” Earlier that year was the now-infamous foot-stepping robbery under the Foster El stop, and around that same time, Hanan’s Finer Foods was held up. I was trying to stay calm, but my voice was strained. In the back of my mind, I realized I sounded maniacal. I knew I was overreacting.
A couple hours later, my roommates and I huddled in our downstairs family room and talked about the incident. We were calm and knew everything was fine, but some of us were more shaken than others. What the emergency e-mail had told us was, “This could happen to YOU! Really. Right on your street.” We could be walking in a group, as these three girls were, on a tree-lined street with family homes, and it could happen.
Three days later a different incident tested all the bells and whistles of our emergency notification system. “There has been a report at approximately 10 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010 of a man with a gun in his waistband on the eleventh floor in the elevator of the Rubloff Building on the Chicago campus.” It might’ve not been on a street like Foster Street, Gaffield Place or Noyes Street, let alone even in Evanston, but it was another strong reality check.
In the NU bubble of cavorting to classes, The Keg, multiple internships, themed parties and our 13 extracurricular activities, it is all too easy to forget Evanston is the real world, and many of us are living in it. It is a city with crime like any other, and that crime can affect us. In the fall messages from “emergencyinfo” hit our inboxes twice in the span of the week when a male student was pushed off his bike and robbed on Noyes. Six days later the aforementioned foot-stepping robbery went down. Then we read about female students on Maple waking up to a strange man inside their house, and about a month earlier was a sexual abuse incident in Technological Institute. And that’s just Fall Quarter. This school year, the clusters of crimes and, as a result, e-mail notifications, are forcing us to think about safety a whole lot more.Dan McAleer, University Police deputy chief, insists we’re on par crime-wise with prior years, but UP has “been better about making sure that the word gets out to students.” Evanston Police Commander Tom Guenther takes it one step further. “Actually what we’re seeing is that crime across the board is down,” he says. The 2008 Illinois Crime Index for Evanston, according to the Evanston Police Department 2008 annual report, is 3,038. The index counts the total number of crime incidents in eight categories, which are are defined by the Illinois State Police, and include burglary, murder, robbery, sexual assault and theft. EPD is still working on publishing the detailed report for 2009, but Guenther says the department already knows the crime index was down 13.4 percent in 2009. That is still about 2,600 documented crimes that occurred last year.
It is difficult to determine crime statistics for what we consider off-campus because UP only keep records for crimes that occur on the campus proper. While UP will respond to an NU student’s call, EPD tracks all crime in Evanston and does not differentiate between students and permanent residents in its reports. The closest estimate is the index for Evanston Police Beat 76, which spans Green Bay Road to Lake Michigan and Church Street to Isabella Street, and covers many popular off-campus student housing areas. In 2009, Beat 76 was down 15 percent from 427 for serious (part one) offenses, which include theft and burglary.
UP only sends e-mails when crime occurs they think students should immediately know about because, for example, it poses a potential threat to students, and they generally stick to utilizing the extensive calling/texting/e-mailing emergency notification system in the case of imminent danger and need-to-issue directions, McAleer says. The alerts do not encompass all the crime against NU students or their properties, which one look in The Daily police blotter on any given day shows. The EPD annual report for 2008 counts almost 2,000 thefts, about 640 buglaries and 125 robberies. Theft is the most common crime among NU students, according to the UP homepage, and it is the theft and break-ins that concern my neighbors, Greg and Margaret Lisinski, who are permanent Evanston residents, more than someone approaching them on the street.
Then there’s the story of my friend, Madison (name has been changed to protect her identity) who, about a year ago, was walking in downtown Evanston in broad daylight on a weekend morning. A man came up behind her, grabbed her arm and forced her into an alley. She had her wallet and phone in her hand, which he could have snatched, she says, but that wasn’t what he was after. She remembers being too paralyzed to scream, wrestling to get free and eventually running away, turning back briefly to see him staring at her. It took Madison about a week to report the incident. “I didn’t want to talk about it; I didn’t want anyone to know. I wanted nothing,” she says.
The truth is we can be doing everything right-or very close to everything right-and things still can happen. Regan Mooney, a SESP sophomore, was one of the girls approached on that Saturday night near my house. She was walking with three other girls, her friends, a mere block between her apartment and her friend’s house around 10 p.m. when two men approached them from behind her, demanded their money and appeared to have a gun. Her impulse was to run, and she sprinted away without looking back.
Mooney, who is on the field hockey team, was calm and composed when recounting what happened. She and her friends are fine, but she admits she had trouble sleeping in the days after the attempted robbery. Between a packed schedule of field hockey and class, she became sleep-deprived quickly and “just got over it because I had to.” She says the incident has made her and her teammates more careful. “It’s so much more real that it’s someone you know,” the sophomore says. “I know we’ve gotten e-mails before, but it’s never like, ‘That’s going to happen.'”
Other students I spoke with echoed the same “It’s not going to happen to me” mentality of which so many of us are guilty. But when multiple crime alerts go out in a week, and especially when you notice what you thought was unlikely, such criminals targeting a group of people or someone on a bike, it is hard to ignore that crime sometimes happens with our classmates as victims. “I know this is wrong, but my instinct was always like, ‘Oh well they were probably doing something stupid,'” Mooney says, referring to crimes against students she had heard about in the past. But she was in a group of three, they were only walking a block, and all were sober. “I couldn’t believe it happened,” she says.Associated Student Government President Mike McGee also lives near where the January 24 attempted robbery took place. On the night of the incident, he left his house to walk to a friend’s apartment in downtown Evanston. He saw co
p car after cop car pull up a couple houses down on his street. “Personally it was crazy because I literally left my house 10 minutes after it happened,” he says. Later he realized what he had witnessed the aftermath of when he received, along with the rest of us, the e-mail notification.
A couple weeks prior, McGee and other ASG members had organized Safety Week, which was a multi-pronged public relations effort to reach students with reminders to act on simple yet important safety measures such as taking shuttles, calling SafeRide and avoiding walking alone at night. They posted flyers in dorms, set up a new site (asg.northwestern.edu/safety) that will remain up and even shot some videos starring Weinberg senior Katie Halpern that focused on public transportation, ATM, library and late night outdoor safety.
Although ASG organized similar safety weeks in past years, McGee says this year’s week was the most comprehensive. ASG amped up Safety Week in light of the one-after-another incidents of Fall Quarter, and because students have seemed noticeably concerned about safety. “I think it was the number and the frequency,” he says of crimes against students in the fall. “There were reports about it, people talked about it, and those few incidents really reverberated through the community.”
Those reverberations also reached University President Morton Schapiro. “I told you last time (we talked) that I was taken aback by a couple of the things that happened,” he says in a January 15, 2010 interview with The Daily. “Two, three months ago that surfaced in my regular talks at dorms, was this safety issue.”
Despite the idyllic lakefront and sprawling North Shore mini mansions Evanston boasts, it is technically a city, one that borders one of the largest cities in the country. “This is an urban environment even though it’s suburban and on the North Shore,” Schapiro says in the January interview. “But we have the great advantages that come with a great urban environment and some of the challenges.” Safety is one of those challenges.
One of the reasons many of us love NU (or at least retain sanity) also is one of the reasons crime is a concern in Evanston and for students: We’re not isolated. As McAleer points out, major transportation systems traverse Evanston, and the NU campus is not closed to the public, although buildings often are. “There are people who come on the campus for the express purpose of victimizing students,” he says. “That’s usually theft.”
We technically have two police departments protecting us-University and Evanston police-which should make us feel doubly safe compared to the rest of Evanston. Still crime will always happen, as McAleer says, and as much as it is the police department’s job to watch over us, the onus is on us to minimize our risk. “There are times when the iPod needs to come out,” McAleer says. Pay attention and be aware of your surroundings, he also encourages. Chances are, it is not the first time you have heard that advice.
Sometimes the simplest advice is hardest to heed. We know walking alone at night is not the best idea, but it is almost a guarantee that every weekend, some NU student somewhere near campus is heading home alone and inebriated. And when it is dark but only early evening, and we have our fifth meeting of the day in Norris, and SafeRide has an hour wait, most of us probably would make the walk alone.
Weinberg junior Cindy Wu was in that situation-heading to a meeting at Norris on a Sunday evening-when a woman approached Wu near the Foster El stop and demanded her purse, stepping on her foot in the process to prevent her from getting away. “The one thing I did wrong,” Wu says in retrospect, “I was listening to my music, and I didn’t realize the girl was there until she was right next to me.” Wu managed to get away from the situation unharmed but down $25 after compromising with her robber to hand over money rather than her whole purse. Wu now takes more steps to be safe, which she admits she was not doing before.While Evanston is, as Guenther says, a “real city with real problems,” few would call it a dangerous place, especially the areas where NU undergraduates live off-campus. My neighbors down the street, the Lisiniskis, have lived in their house for 23 years. “This is not the inner-city; this is not like some crime-ridden area,” Margaret says. “People shouldn’t feel like they’re on lockdown and can’t go out.” The Lisinskis and some of their friends in the neighborhood have been the victims of a break-in and thefts, but Greg and Margaret say they are comfortable where they live and, for the most part, feel safe. They raised three now college-aged and older children on Pratt Court. “People feel relatively safe here,” Margaret says.
No matter how safe a place, crime occurs, and it is important for people to know about it. “It is always healthy for people to know,” McAleer says. “I don’t like having the incidents, but it’s good for people to be aware that those incidents do happen.” Still it would be irrational to operate in fear. We drive in cars, and we fly in planes. We take risks every day, and the key is to do as much as possible to cut down on that risk without becoming paranoid. Like the example McGee gives, you could vow to not leave your house unless you have at least five people accompanying you and two cop cars driving next to you down the street; then you slip on ice.
