Staying Safe in the City

When it comes to student safety, this school year proved to be quite the reality check for the Harvard community. While assaults have always been relatively rare, Harvard experienced an unusual bout of crime this year, with 12 indecent assaults on and around campus.

The rash of incidents quickly revealed Harvard’s lackluster crime prevention and awareness programs. After one of the first assaults, administrators urged students to use SafetyWalk, a much-advertised volunteer-run walking escort service. But it was soon revealed that the program had quietly become defunct the previous year. What’s worse, while it had been Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) policy to send an e-mail to officials in the Harvard community within 48 hours of an assault, in many instances these e-mails languished in administrators’ inboxes, and many students did not receive word of the attack until days after it occurred.

After a series of highly publicized stumbles, administrators finally responded with a solid campaign to bolster security. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd, Harvard has built a stronger University infrastructure capable of combating assaults on campus. Revamping what had been a very decentralized system, the administration has moved to combine the resources of HUPD, College administrators, Mass. Hall officials, facilities managers and student leaders to generate a powerful, centralized response to campus crime.

During this past year, the College extended shuttle and van operation hours, deployed more HUPD patrols, e-mailed safety alerts directly to students, launched the Harvard University Campus Escort Service Program (HUCEP) to replace SafetyWalk and created a centralized hotline to help students keep track of the new services and dispatch late-night police escorts.

These new initiatives have helped. Marked escorts now frequent the streets during the evening to accompany students walking alone after dark, and HUPD has increased the presence of police officers on foot, riding bicycles and in cars across campus, targeting areas where the assaults have occurred and the routes students frequent. Extended van service and a new transportation hotline provide students with more transportation late at night.

But while the administration’s recent efforts are good, more can still be done to help improve this system. The Council of Masters recently decided to allow each undergraduate House to determine its own policy on keycard access—with universal keycard access (UKA) being the “default” system in place beginning this September. The Council’s decision is a long awaited and encouraging step, but the fact that Houses can still opt out undermines the effectiveness of the change. We strongly encourage all House masters to adopt the default system. Students’ ability to swipe into any House during the night provides them with nearby safe havens in the event that they are threatened far away from their own Houses.

In addition, the HUCEP program should be modified to better meet student safety needs. The plan currently calls for roaming pairs of students beginning at 7 p.m. on weekdays in three regions: the river Houses, the Yard and the Quad. But the majority of the assaults this past year occurred before 7 p.m. The escorts would be more effective if they began patrolling at dusk instead—changing the starting time in accordance with the seasons. Furthermore, given the huge area included in the river House and Quad zones, HUCEP ought to employ more than one pair of escorts in each of these zones.

Finally, Harvard must continue to engage in a dialogue with the city of Cambridge to promote safety in areas frequented by students but outside of HUPD’s jurisdiction, such as Cambridge Commons. Improving lighting in the commons and raising police visibility would help deter potential attackers in this area.

Thanks to the new initiatives, the Harvard community is now safer. But while Harvard’s recent moves are constructive and welcomed, it is unfortunate that it took a rash of assaults to force the administration to seriously reconsider how it was dealing with safety on campus. We hope that the pause of assaults during the past few months will not cause the administration to forget about this important issue once again.