Two weeks ago, on Saturday, I woke up far too early to the sound of drilling in the common room of my suite. I managed to fall back asleep (someone else had answered the door), but when after finally rolling out of bed, I noticed the peephole installed in the suite’s door.
A few days before that morning, I was at a Student Union Senate meeting, where the Senators were discussing the issue of safety after the case of sexual assault. Peepholes were brought up. Security cameras were almost brought up, and then generally dismissed, the measure seeming too Orwellian and anyhow more of means to track crime than to deter it. Peepholes, however, were inexpensive and worked on the basis of their owners’ active usage.
The day the peepholes were installed, I heard a knocking on the door. Forgetting to look through the door, I opened it. It was my suitemate; he had forgotten his keycard. Afterward, however, I realized that it could have been a potential robber, or worse, a potential assailant.
A few days after the sexual assault, I was studying at the Danforth library, reading Shakespeare and trying to pry the subtext out of Oberon’s lines. Someone rapped at the window (the Danforth library is right next to the hall’s door), so I went to open the door for her; it was terribly cold outside, and she had materials in her hand befitting a beleaguered architecture student. I remembered the safety advice given – not to let strangers in without precaution – but it would have been a little heartless, I felt, not to open the door.
The same day, I had forgotten to bring my ID card with me as I left the dormitory. I didn’t have to call someone I knew within the building, though, because someone exiting it left the door open for me.
Things like these probably happen every day to you, who aren’t in general thought of as robbers, assailants and intruders, but as regular University students. You open doors for others – you’d kind of be an asshole to leave a weary architecture student out in the cold – and others open doors for you.
Today, I looked at a security notice from Jan. 29, describing a thief in the building as a young woman with dreadlocks; it somewhat broke my mental image of the burly male intruder with tattoos from prison. There are also, no doubt, University students themselves committing crimes of opportunity. (My old TI-83 calculator may well be in another undergraduate’s backpack as he reads this paper.)
Today I remembered far back to an investigative report that Channel 4 News did on campus security. An investigative reporter was sent to four university campuses in the St. Louis area – this one among them – to enter dorm buildings as a means to test security. When he went into Dardick Hall, a small group of students left the door open for him; those students later called the WUPD, who confronted him outside the hall. Campus security, it seems, is often a matter of both students and security personnel; as a student, however, I’m still reluctant to refuse to leave doors open for the sake of niceness, and I can imagine my frustration at being left out alone in the cold (or in the heat) without a keycard in my pocket.
Housing for the next year is coming up; after having read Samantha White’s op-ed article in Friday’s paper, “Our campus is not secure,” I’m somewhat wary of off-campus living. But even if safety does, to some degree, begin with students ourselves, I’m still skeptical of how security-minded both parties – students and security personnel – will be as time passes, and, as I hope it won’t be, the memory of the assault fades.
David is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].