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Open campus invites crime
By Geof Wollerman
gwollerm@mscd.edu

Theft is the most prevalent crime on Auraria. And according to campus administrators and police, the open nature of the campus and its proximity to downtown – coupled with a lack of awareness among students and faculty – may be to blame.

Since August 2006 a total of 222 crimes – not including arrests for warrants – were reported by the Auraria Police Department. Of these, 171, or 77 percent, were theft-related, which includes shoplifting, robbery and burglary.

“We are what I call ‘an attractive nuisance’ to some of the less desirable elements within society, and we just have to be more prudent,” said Dean Wolf, executive vice president for administration for the Auraria Higher Education Center. Wolf said the number of thefts taking place on campus was a growing concern.

Students and faculty need to be more aware of people or situations that seem suspicious and report them immediately to the Auraria police, Wolf said.

The campus uses card readers on all of its exterior doors, which are automatically locked at 10:30 p.m., said James Fraser, a division director for Auraria’s Facilities Management Department. This is when the majority of the housekeeping staff comes on duty and the third watch of the Auraria police begins, Fraser said. Police officers do a routine patrol of the campus and its buildings checking for unlocked doors and people who don’t belong in buildings.

“I wouldn’t say routinely, but I would say on a fairly regular basis, they find people in buildings at night that don’t belong,” Fraser said.

He recently spent some time following the housekeeping staff around at night, and he said there were several instances in which one of his staff would open up a door to an office and find somebody sleeping on the floor.

“We’re talking about all sorts of folks … there’s a lot of interesting stuff that happens here on campus at night. There are folks who get in and just kind of hang out in spaces where they don’t belong,” he said.

It is impossible to know how many campus crimes are committed by non-students, said Heather Coogan, chief of the Auraria police. According to police crime logs, however, in January and February at least 11 people were arrested by Auraria police and designated as having no campus affiliation or an unknown campus affiliation.

Though the campus is relatively secure at night, the real problem is with crime that happens during the day. Nearly 40 percent of theft-related crimes on campus are designated as burglaries or thefts from buildings. Of the 47 thefts from buildings reported since August 2006, 41 were committed between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. The laptop stolen from a faculty member’s office in February was taken at about 2 p.m.

“At two in the afternoon everything is wide open,” Fraser said. “It becomes an issue for personal diligence. If you’ve got something pilferable and your office is in a public area, I’d lock my door.”

It is easy for non-students to wander around campus during the day unnoticed, Fraser said.

“During the day it really boils down to personal security and personal diligence, because we’re open,” Fraser said. ”We’ve got 38,000 students on campus, and we don’t require any badges, we don’t require any particular identification of any nature, so we’re here and we’re open to the public.”

In general there is an awareness among faculty and staff that Auraria is a wide-open public campus, and most people take the appropriate measures to safeguard their property, Fraser said.

“But when you’re this open and you’re around this many people, stuff’s going to happen,” he said.

As the population of the campus grows and more buildings are added, other security measures may be needed, and there will almost certainly be a need to add more police officers. But as of yet no specific plans have been discussed, Wolf said.

“Right now we’re just trying to get completely hired up, because it is difficult to find quality police officers. It’s not only us, but all municipalities are having trouble finding folks who want to be in this line of work,” Wolf said.

Coogan concurred and said problems with staffing are usually a matter of funding.

“We would always take more officers,” Coogan said. “We have limited numbers. The function of how much we put into it is always about money. That’s always the bottom line. … There is a lot more we could do with more officers, but I think we do a pretty good job as it is right now.”

While Auraria may have its problems with crime – and theft in particular – it remains one of the safest campuses of its size in the country, and students shouldn’t get the idea that Auraria is somehow an unsafe place to attend school, Coogan said.

“There are people who come to campus to commit crime,” Coogan said. “But I don’t think all criminals go, ‘Let’s go to Auraria.’ Otherwise our crime rate would be a lot higher than it is.”

Despite the relative safety of campus, more needs to be done to educate students and faculty, Wolf said.

“We’re past the days where you can just leave your office empty and assume that everything is going to be fine,” he said.

Coogan agreed that people need to be more aware, particularly with their belongings and when walking around campus with valuables such as iPods.

“The campus is a very safe place, but we’re also sitting in the middle of an urban city,” she said. “We can’t be naive about these things.”