FALLING CRIME: In recent years, aberrant, violent crimes have shattered students' sense of well-being. Is history repeating itse

One thing keeps the people who run the Division of Public Safety up at night -- an unending fear that a single, aberrant incident will belie the fact that crime on and around campus has been steadily falling for three years now, and shatter a general sense of security that has set in among students. It happened in 1996, after several high-profile robberies, one of which led to the shooting of a College senior and another of which ended with the stabbing death of a University scientist. And history seemed to repeat itself last week, when a knife attack on a Penn sophomore early one morning in the heart of campus sparked heated questions about whether Public Safety was doing enough to protect the University community. "The public in general doesn't pay a lot of attention to where the crime rate is going," Vice President for Public Safety Tom Seamon noted in an interview earlier this month, before the attack. But he warned, perhaps prophetically, students do "pay attention to single, extremely serious incidents. If you have one serious incident, that portrays that the University is generally unsafe, and it takes a long time to turn that perception around." And that was indeed the message students took away from the incident. The assault -- which has led to an attempted murder charge for 16-year-old Steven Woodson, who will be tried as an adult -- shook the campus last week, as a rash of unsubstantiated charges against Public Safety prompted students to question the competence of the people who are supposed to keep them safe. The Numbers Despite the assault, the numbers show that students are a good deal safer than they were two years ago. Public Safety officials are proud of the statistics: According to recently released University Police statistics, robberies fell 37 percent in the 12-month period between July 1, 1997, and June 30, 1998, when compared to the same period two years earlier. Thefts are down 14 percent; car thefts down 37 percent; and total crime, in terms of the number of incidents reported to police, was down 11 percent from two years earlier. The news is not all good, though -- the number of assaults and burglaries rose by about 12 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Officials frequently deflect credit for their successes so they can, in turn, deflect criticism. "In the police business, you don't want to be blamed for crime waves, [so] you don't want to take credit for the decrease," University Police Chief Maureen Rush said early this month, adding that credit for the downward trend rests partly with her 100-plus officers and partly with other major Penn initiatives. The statistics used in this article reflect the number of crimes reported to the University Police occurring on- or off-campus inside the department's patrol area, which is bounded by the Schuylkill River and 43rd Street to the east and west, Market Street to the north and Baltimore Avenue to the south. "There's always need for improvement," Undergraduate Assembly Chairperson Bill Conway said. "You might have gone from bad to OK, [but] I don't think we're at the stage where we can call it good yet." Still, Conway applauded Public Safety for the strides they have made over the past few years. "I think they have made some real improvements," he said. "And I think that students do feel safer on average." Seamon said the overall decrease in crime proves that officials have started to accomplish their primary goal of changing the image of Penn from that of an easy mark for criminals. "We've tried to build up the reputation that if you want to commit a crime, the area of the Penn campus is not a good place to be," said Seamon, a former Philadelphia Police Department deputy commissioner. "You'll either be arrested on the spot or we'll hunt you down." Public Safety has undergone many changes since Seamon took the reins of the division -- which includes the University Police, Security Services and Special Services -- from John Kuprevich in September 1995. For starters, in addition to overhauling his management team, Seamon's department has increased lighting on and around campus, added more emergency blue light phones, increased campus escort services and added more police officers and security guards to patrol the streets. Seamon also doubled the size of the department's detective team from four to eight, enabling Penn to handle more investigations of campus crimes in-house, rather than delegating them to the backlogged Philadelphia Police Department. The decrease in serious crime has freed up resources to concentrate on more basic "quality-of-life" crimes, police officials have said, and it has also allowed police to try instituting preventive measures, rather than simply responding when something bad happens. "It gives us the opportunity to concentrate on other issues, like burglaries, like bicycle theft," Rush said. "It allows us to have the time to proactively target other types of crime." 'The Central Statistic' Seamon said that the statistic he is most proud of is the large drop in robberies. "From '96 on, we really targeted robberies," he said. "That has been the central statistic that I've [measured as to] whether everything I've been trying to do has been effective." There were two high profile robberies in the fall of 1996, one of which led to the stabbing death of University biochemist Vladimir Sled on the 4300 block of Larchwood Avenue. In the other, then-senior Patrick Leroy was shot in the back right hip during a robbery attempt near the corner of 40th and Locust streets. Both incidents led to arrests and jail time for the perpetrators. Those incidents, at least indirectly, spurred the University to take action on several fronts. In the months after the crimes, Penn officials unveiled the UC Brite program, which improved lighting across University City; a special-services district focused on keeping the campus area clean and safe, and an increased focus on luring retail like Robert Redford's Sundance Cinemas to the area to increase foot traffic. Additionally, police created a Special Response Team, which officials credit with contributing most directly to the downward trend in serious crime. The SRT serves as a "preventive measure," according to Rush. The mix of uniformed and plain-clothes officers respond to crimes-in-progress and patrol the area for suspicious-looking people. "They're looking at behaviors to try to identify someone who could be the next perpetrator," Rush said. The Bad News The most alarming statistic is the double-digit percentage increase in burglaries, which went from 146 in 1995 to 165 in the most recent set of statistics, including a 50 percent increase in on-campus burglaries. "That's a problem you can't deal with as effectively in the short-term," Seamon said, explaining that criminals often make a career out of burglarizing West Philadelphia buildings. In fact, according to Rush, most of the burglaries have been the work of only a handful of criminals. And because of the nature of the stealth crime, burglaries are hard to detect and prevent, though in early October, University Police arrested a man they believed to be responsible for a string of eight burglaries in student housing near campus. But Seamon was optimistic that the burglary rate -- as well as the theft rate, down 13 percent since 1995, which Seamon said is not enough -- will decrease. "Because we've had a real impact on the street crime, we've got the luxury to start really looking at patterns in theft and burglary," he said, explaining that "the combination of better security systems and long-term investigations" will force the rates down. Assaults are also hard to eliminate, officials noted, but they emphasized that a lot of the assaults these days are student-on-student, rather than random crimes like what happened at Steinberg-Dietrich. "That's a component that you're really not going to affect quite as easily as you are robberies," Rush said. But officials from across the University are brainstorming possible ways to prevent those isolated random crimes -- including the possibility of requiring students and faculty to wear special Penn ID badges when they are in University buildings late at night. The Crime Spree that Wasn't? The statistics also showed that despite the widespread publicity about the crime wave in 1996, crime was actually on its way down from the previous year -- robberies were down 16 percent for the year ending in June 1997 from the year before, and no type of crime was up significantly. Still, Seamon said, the rate of crime was much too high that year, and the Sled and Leroy incidents served to "put a spotlight" on that. Also, even though the rate may not have been as high as the previous year, the criminals preying on University City residents "were more violent and more aggressive," according to Rush. "The fear level was very different." Minimizing the Possibility Seamon said he believes the community has much more confidence in his department now than they did two years ago. "I think that people will understand that the University is doing as much as possible. It helps the community in general to keep an unusual incident in perspective," he said. "There always can be a horrible incident," Seamon added. "Unfortunately, that's life in America today." And he cautione that his division is intent on doing that as much as it can, given Penn's urban location. "Can we eliminate crime to zero?" he asked. "Well, we can't, of course?. What we try to do is minimize that possibility as much as possible."