Mean Streets

On Sunday night, a male undergraduate was threatened at knifepoint at the corner of JFK St. and Memorial Dr., steps away from Eliot House. According to a community advisory released by the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) yesterday, the cunning would-be victim, asked to hand over his wallet, gave his would-be attacker the impression that he was about to comply, only to throw his backpack at the ne’er-do-well, knocking him to the ground. According to the advisory, the student wrestled the suspect’s weapon away from him while he was on the pavement, before the foiled bandit took off across the bridge and into Allston.

Early last Thursday morning, a stranger visited Ho A. Tuan ’09 in his suite at 20 DeWolfe St. Having forgotten that it was a college dormitory he was ostensibly planning to burglarize, the man seemed surprised to find Tuan awake in the wee small hours of the morning. Dumbstruck, he asked Tuan if he could make change for a dollar. He produced a dollar bill from his pocket, for dramatic effect. And then he ran away.

On March 7, an unidentified miscreant left a taxicab outside Quincy House without paying the fare. Angered, perhaps, by the slighted driver’s protestations, the suspect allegedly stumbled to the House’s glass side-door, shoved someone through it, and went on his merry way. Though his victim wound up hospitalized, the details of the attack remain hazy; interim House Masters Lee and Deb Gehrke, in an email to Quincy residents, wrote enigmatically that, “the full details of the incident are not known, and may never be completely known.”

There are several obvious conclusions to be drawn from the very recent history of crime at Harvard. Perpetrators tend to be tight-fisted, easily knocked-down, and exceptionally stupid. Incidents are common enough to make any world-weary undergraduate nervous; the first two months of 2007 saw eight reported thefts from College residences alone.

Most importantly, however, Harvard’s powers-that-be are consistently careful to reassure us that we have nothing to fear. After Tuan’s run-in with the change-seeking almost-bandit, HUPD spokesman Steven G. Catalano told The Crimson that, “we do not feel that there is a continuing public safety threat to the community.” The previous week, after Quincy House’s violent defenestration, Catalano assured reporters that the incident was “being actively investigated.” Though he declined to comment further, the Masters Gehrke assured residents that “we strongly believe that this was an isolated incident.”

Conventional wisdom holds that, unlike some of its peer institutions, Harvard doesn’t have a crime problem. At the University of Pennsylvania, tour guides point out the forest of emergency phones up and down the campus’ main drag, a panacea against the reputed urban ills of the university’s setting in West Philadelphia, a locality that is probably more familiar to college students as the crime-addled birthplace of the Fresh Prince of Belair. During our annual pissing match with Yale, Harvard students love to poke fun at New Haven’s unsafe reputation. As far as perceptions are concerned, Harvard doesn’t have much more big city excitement to boast than does Princeton, whose glee club sings that, “Nothing ever happens in Princeton/Of the real world we are in the dark/Policemen here are just for decoration/Blue light phones constructed for a lark.”

In 2005, Cambridge was home to more than three times the number of robberies and aggravated assaults per capita than was Princeton. What’s more, this city’s crime rates that year were the lowest in four decades, according to the Cambridge Police Department’s 2005 Annual Crime Report. But the perception of almost tedious tranquillity that gives Princeton choirboys such glee is endemic to Harvard, and without good reason.

The isolated break-ins, muggings, and assaults that happen in Harvard Square’s mean streets are trivialized as a series of isolated incidents, random occurrences that most of us have no reason to fear. One student, robbed in broad daylight in the middle of Harvard Yard this past January, even told The Crimson that the ordeal was a “freak incident,” and that he still felt safe walking around Harvard Square.

There is no question that Harvard students need to become more cautious. But the needed cultural change ought to also transcend to a higher level: Authorities might need to suppress their gut instinct to calm and reassure their charges when it comes to crime, and exhortations to caution need to go beyond perfunctory email warnings after break-ins, tiny placards on swipe card readers, and other petty measures. New Harvard students spend hours learning how not to injure themselves drinking and how to prevent sexual assault; a more strongly-articulated reality check on what it means to stay safe in our community might be in order, as well, during Freshman Week and beyond.

Harvard students don’t have to deal with the security checks, guest sign-in procedures, and restrictions on visitors that other universities in the Boston area impose on their undergraduates, and that’s great indeed. The obvious flip-side of our openness, of our superiors’ chronic reassurances, and the alacrity with which we approach the advisories in our inboxes, is that we tend to think we’re far safer than we actually are. That’s not a good thing, for the people whom we hurt the most, with our inflated estimations of safety, are ultimately ourselves.

Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.