The past couple weeks I have started questioning my safety while on Butler’s campus. When I go for a run, I feel more conscientious and am constantly checking over my shoulder. I am no longer comfortable walking home at night. This was a campus where I used to be confident in my safety and rarely even thought about it. In light of recent events, I am concerned about the transparency of BUPD and how effectively DawgAlert is being used to communicate with students.
The Butler-Tarkington area is full of older students, such as myself, and families. It is an incredibly small neighborhood, measuring less than 0.15 square miles. A large majority of the senior class and graduate students choose to live there due to its convenience to campus. The university is very aware of Butler student’s prevalence in the Butler-Tarkington area, so why have we been left out of the conversation?
The reason I signed up for DawgAlert freshman year was to be in the loop when things happened on campus. DawgAlert was created to spread the word about incidents on or near campus that could be dangerous to students. My parents signed up as well so they could check in when they were concerned about my safety. Lately, this has not been utilized effectively. It used to be made very clear if a situation could be dangerous to their college daughter, but the partial messages have made my parents more concerned and at times frantic about my well-being. Several of the messages have been partial messages or sent without any information at all. Others have been missing a location. I have been walking home from the library and received an alert about an armed robbery at…? How do I know if I am safe where I am currently at? How do I know if I am going to cross paths with an armed robber?
This Tuesday, I learned about a homicide within walking distance of my home by reading an article posted on Facebook. As a college student, I went two years without a TV or had to share a TV with sixty other individuals in a sorority house. News has always been obtained via DawgAlert if it was something severe or via social media. Lately, DawgAlert has been failing me and I do not trust them to keep me in the know. I have always had faith in BUPD to transparently keep me informed when I should be concerned about my safety. An email to students would even be beneficial so that students could be accurately informed about the homicides in their area. Hopefully BUPD is increasing their usual patrol throughout the area to keep students safe. Unfortunately, we have not recieved any notification in regards to how BUPD is going to keep students from getting in the way of these outside incidents. It does not seem like the violence is going to stop, so students living in the Butler-Tarkington area should be hyper-vigilant.
The fourth homicide in a 0.15 mile area. The fourth homicide in an area that I currently call home. All I am asking is for Butler University to look out for their students and be slightly more vigilant in communicating information to the students living in an area that is going through a safety crisis.
