Open your eyes, close and lock your doors
Published: October 15, 2010Section: Editorials
During the past month, the Brandeis community has been the subject of many events that some may consider uncharacteristic of the university. The flasher, castle dorm thefts and credit card frauds are all examples of incidents we would like to think occur in the outside world, not at Brandeis.
We like to think that here in our Brandeis bubble, people remain clothed in public spaces, our possessions are safe without locked doors and credit card transactions are secure.
Clearly, this is not the case, and some have expressed surprise that our insular community has been invaded by the real world.
It’s understandable that community members were taken aback by these events. After all, in the past three years, there have been no instances of robbery, and only 47 instances of burglary, according to the Department of Public Safety’s crime statistics. We disregard the warnings of public safety officials and community advisers telling us not to prop open doors or open them for strangers, we leave our dorm rooms unlocked, and consider ourselves safe.
Frankly, this train of thought is naïve. The Brandeis bubble has not been popped, it never existed. Brandeis is part of the real world, as are thefts, flashers and fraud.
Maybe we are simply too buried in midterms and papers to remember to lock our doors, maybe some of us are too lazy to carry our keys around.
Either way, these incidents should serve as a wake up call.
Some have suggested that the university’s latest crime rash is due to a flaw in public safety, that if Ed Callahan and his officers did something different, these incidents would not have occurred.
Brandeis isn’t suffering from a lack of campus security, we are suffering from a lack of common sense.