It was Sept. 25, 1996.
Classes had started 21 days before, and parents of freshmen were calming down slightly -- realizing that their children, new to college, would be fine.
Then Patrick Leroy, a College senior, was shot in the back during an attempted robbery while making his way home from Smokey Joe's.
Leroy would eventually recover, but his shooting, coming amidst a period of unprecedented armed robberies, shook the University administration to attention.
That fall, the number of early decision applications to Penn fell by 10.4 percent. Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson attributed this decline, in part, to concerns about safety on Penn's campus, and some parents concurred.
For Penn, Leroy's shooting represented more than an isolated tragedy -- it was part of a larger trend, a sign that changes needed to be made in the University's security strategies.
On Sept. 26, the day following the incident, University President Judith Rodin, in office not quite two years, held an open meeting with students in Zellerbach Theatre in an attempt to calm a scared -- and outraged -- student body.
Maureen Rush, then director of police operations and now vice president for public safety, remembers speaking to students at a meeting during that period.
"I felt like I was the feeding element at the zoo that day," Rush said.
At that open council meeting, Rodin outlined an eight-step plan toward improved campus safety. She talked of increasing the size of Penn's police force, adding blue-light phones around campus, increasing the number of security guards on campus, supporting the student-run security service Penn Watch and embarking on various campus and neighborhood beautification projects, among other measures.
Sure enough, in the next few years, crime around campus began to decline.
In 1996, there were 1,584 crimes reported to Penn's Division of Public Safety. In 2002, there were 1,092. There have been 18 percent fewer reported crimes around Penn's campus this calendar year than there were during the same period in 1996.
The decline in crime cannot be contributed to Penn initiatives alone. Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and a Penn undergraduate and Ph.D. candidate in the late '60s and early '70s, emphasized that crime has fallen in every major city in the United States over the last 10 years.
"I think President Rodin did some positive things, but I think it would be equally ridiculous to attribute the decline of crime in New York to Rudolph Giuliani," Krisberg said.
He explained that a greatly improved economy did more for decreased crime rates than any policy change of Rodin's could.
Rush agreed that crime is cyclical, and that no combative efforts a university or a police force take against crime can change that.
Still, crime in University City has decreased at a rate greater than that of the decline in Philadelphia in general, and that, some would say, has to do with changes in the way things are done within Penn's Public Safety division.
For Rush and Chief of Police Thomas Rambo, Rodin's push for consolidation and cooperation has aided in improving safety in the University area.
When Rush came to work at Public Safety, a month or two before Rodin was inaugurated, there was little coordination between the Penn police and other safety groups.
"The vision was to first off revamp the command staff of the Division of Public Safety," Rush said. "So over the next couple of years, there were lots of changes made within Public Safety -- lots of promotions, lots of changes."
Paul Steinke, current general manager for Reading Terminal Market and former University City District executive director, cited Rush as an example of an intelligent promotion made under Rodin's administration. He explained that Rush came from the Philadelphia police force whereas Tom Seamon, Rush's predecessor, had come from Rhode Island, and was potentially less understanding of Philadelphia crime than Rush.
Administrative appointments and restructuring weren't the only changes that helped Penn drive down its crime rate, though.
Between 1996 and 1999, Rush explained, Public Safety grew to encompass fire and emergency services and the security and technology departments were greatly expanded.
Krisberg said that steps like these, particularly the tremendous differences in safety technology available today, have aided most urban schools in becoming safer environments.
It was also in 1996 that the University reorganized the way it outsourced security services -- it contracted Spectaguard, now Allied-Spectaguard, to work as the only security guard service on campus and expanded its duties, Rush said.
"We have a great police department here and all we really needed was the confidence and the authority, you know, [to] go ahead and do it -- and they did it," Rambo said. He noted that more than leading the department, Rodin listened to what people recommended and flew with it. Rush agreed, explaining that Rodin hired people she trusted and then worked with them strategically to improve Penn's safety departments.
The decrease in crime on campus may have depended on more than just the efforts of public safety officials, though.
Jeffrey Roth, associate director for research at the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at Penn, said that often, the level of crime in a particular area is related to its physical quality and upkeep, such that certain initiatives could have aided Penn's improved safety record.
"It's widely thought that the quality of life and the extent of physical decay in a community has a lot to do with crime," Roth said. "There's what's called the Broken Windows Theory, which is that... if a neighborhood lets broken windows accumulate, graffiti, just general dirt, trash, accumulate, that changes the culture and creates more of an anything goes environment -- and that's conducive to crime."
Combating that environment is, in part, the role of the UCD -- created by Rodin and former Executive Vice President John Fry in 1997 as a not-for-profit organization that would oversee and help fund improvements to the West Philadelphia area.
Roth talked about the University's beautification of the neighborhood around campus -- as opposed to campus alone -- and other components of the programs run by the UCD as significant in the general reduction of area crime.
"I think clearly the impetus for the UCD came from the emphasis that Penn's president put on doing more to engage the University with its community," Steinke said.
Rodin herself agreed that the UCD and other improvements in University City have helped reduce campus crime.
"Instead of only focusing on crime, which was the major symptom, we tried to really build back infrastructure and capacity, to go for systemic change," Rodin said.
Despite the drop in violent crimes on and around campus, now is far from the time for the University to allow itself to fall back on its laurels, Rush said. As the economy has weakened, crime has once again begun a slight upward climb on a nationwide scale.
"There's lots of compelling reasons that we can't for a second believe that 'Oh, you know, crime rates are down, and geez, we've licked that problem," Rush said, urging the University community -- and the trustees who will be searching for Rodin's replacement -- to do the same.
About this series Penn is a very different place now than it was back in 1994, when University President Judith Rodin first took the helm. And now that Rodin has announced that she will leave her position in June, the University is apt to see more changes in the future. For the next week and a half, The Daily Pennsylvanian will examine a variety of issues, events and people on and around campus that have been affected under Rodin's decade-long tenure. Topics will range from Penn's reputation in higher education to the build-up of retail around campus to expectations for Rodin's successor.
