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In print | Published November 11, 2004

No student should ever be in a situation where he’s being threatened and intimidated by armed strangers from off campus. Yes, such incidents are relatively rare, but we’ve had incidents of assault, attempted kidnapping, burglary and rape occur before, many of which could have been prevented by simple security measures. It’s pure foolishness to claim we must wait for these incidents to become more frequent or more egregious before we address them.

For instance, it’s hard to prevent a few irresponsible students from propping dorm doors for their own convenience, but there are things the college could do to prevent it. Giving doors electronic locks opened by our student ID cards would save students from having to remember their keys as well as their IDs when leaving their rooms, decreasing the need for propped doors, and also making more feasible the possible solution of auto-locking doors for individual rooms — a serious inconvenience, but one that would greatly reduce the ease of casual theft and the ability to enter others’ rooms by force.

And following the steps of other schools that set off loud, irritating alarms when doors are kept propped open too long would help reinforce our commitment to enforcing campus security over some students’ few seconds’ worth of convenience. Similarly, we need to end the official practice of keeping Parrish doors unlocked 24 hours a day and subjecting Parrish residents to unequal risk of assault or theft. If Parrish needs to be accessible 24 hours a day, then Parrish doors can become accessible to all students or staff with keys, but there’s no reason that any building on campus needs to be accessible to random strangers 24 hours a day.

Finally, one major crime deterrent on other campuses is the presence of highly visible blue-light public phones that students can use to call campus police if they’re being followed or threatened. Our campus has a comparative dearth of public telephones, and given that we have numerous poorly lit routes across campus students often pass through late at night, this is an unconscionable oversight.

Of course these policies would inconvenience people and reduce Swarthmore’s free-flowing traffic and image of a safe, utopian community. But such an image is probably a false one — Swarthmore is not very far from the urban center of Philadelphia or high crime-risk areas like Chester, after all, and we would rather the administration actively take steps to prevent a future tragedy now than be forced into doing so by negative publicity and lawsuits after a preventable assault, kidnapping or murder occurs.

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