Another week, another crime that I did not receive an official crime alert for.
The first words out of my mouth are typically, “Where is the IU crime alert?”
I would like to clarify that I understand why we do not receive a crime alert for every crime that happens in Bloomington.
Not all crime takes place on campus, and IU Notify focuses on campus-specific incidents, as the concentrated student population lives on campus.
However, when the crimes involve sexual assaults, break-ins or robberies that affect students, we should be receiving alerts.
During my freshman and sophomore years, I remember receiving many crime alerts ranging from silly incidents like the Blow Dart Bandit to missing students. This is not quite the case this school year.
During Welcome Week, we received an alert for an attempted robbery at the Village Pantry, but I can’t recall many other crime alerts since then, despite the high crime activity so far this year.
For example, a masked man broke into female students’ apartments in a general area and robbed them and/or raped them — for which we received no alerts.
Just because some of these incidents are not happening on campus, it does not mean that they are no longer affecting students.
Students come and go from campus every day and travel through areas of heavy crime, but they may not know if there are ongoing incidents because of the lack of notifications.
The IU and Bloomington Police Departments are not conjoined, which I realize. I also realize that people report different crimes to different police departments.
Whoever runs the notification system should communicate with both of the departments to see if anything has been reported that affects students.
Of course, before I came to rant and rave about my feelings about lack of notifications, I looked into other channels that report crime and emergency situations in Bloomington.
I discovered that IU has at least two websites that report criminal activities and other emergencies around campus and the immediate area.
IUPD has a daily crime log that is posted every day on http://www.indiana.edu/~iupd/dailyLog.html. Here, you can find criminal activity around campus that occurred in the dorms or other campus buildings. The logs protect privacy of those involved. They only give the time of the crime, location and type of crime.
The other website I discovered revolves around emergency situations, online safety, and environmental safety. The webpage is called “Protect IU.” There, you can report an offense, check registered sexual offenders and check the emergency status of IU.
I learned that IU Notify and Crime Alert stem from the “Protect IU” webpage.
It’s important to me and many other students that we are notified about terrible crimes on campus, especially sexual assaults.
For some reason, sexual assaults are becoming more and more common. It’s impossible to assume every sexual assault will be reported. The stigma surrounding reporting sexual assault gets me heated enough to write a whole other column, but not this week.
IU should report any and all situations it is aware of. The grisly details do not need to be known. We don’t need to know the names of the assailant or the assaulted.
But I will never forget the fear in my best friend’s eyes when she learned there had been a sexual assault in her dorm and she was not notified.
Nor will I forget the feeling of knowing assaults have been happening on or around campus and IU has not done a single thing to alert us.
