On Christmas Day, a West Philadelphia man was murdered inside Philly Diner, located at 3925 Walnut St.
Less than a month later, Engineering sophomore Mari Oishi was shot in the leg near the intersection of 38th and Walnut streets.
Any rash of crime inevitably sparks concern about efforts to control violence on campus. And at urban campuses, the threat may seem particularly present.
Schools in big cities, like Penn, devote millions of dollars and hundreds of personnel in an effort to create a safe enclave in areas often high in crime -- assuming they have the resources.
And when Penn's efforts are compared to those of schools in similar environments, the University stacks up well in terms of the resources it commits and the methods it uses.
Still, with crime-fighting techniques constantly moving forward, Penn and other urban schools are l-ooking into a few new tricks while still relying on some old ones.
Budget
When it comes to money, Penn is able to shell out more than many other city schools.
Today, the budget of the Division of Public Safety -- encompassing six different departments -- stands at $15 million. Added to that, $7 million is devoted capital projects involving security in campus buildings, bringing Penn's total security expenditures to $22 million for fiscal year 2006, which ends June 30.
Compare that to the $10 million security budget of Columbia University, in New York City, and the $4 million budget of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore -- both of which opt to fight crime without the luxury of a private police force such as Penn maintains.
The University of Chicago security budget -- though it only includes police expenditures -- nevertheless sits behind Penn's at $6 to 7 million.
And with a $5 million pledge to increase safety from University President Amy Gutmann, Penn's own security budget -- which stood at $11.2 million in 1997 -- continues to rise.
Penn has also seen a dramatic decrease in crime since the late '90s, with total crime down 41 percent since 1996, according to Division of Public Safety figures, paralleling a nationwide decrease in crime during that decade.
Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush credits a number of initiatives for the drop in crime, among them the installation of closed-circuit surveillance cameras and the hiring of AlliedBarton Security guards in 1997, as well as the beginning of the West Philadelphia Initiative and other community-outreach programs in the mid-1990s.
Still, despite the improvements, Penn's crime rates have stayed near the worst among schools located in similar urban environments.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, Penn's rate of 27.89 robberies per 10,000 students ranks it last when compared to four similar schools -- Columbia, Chicago, Johns Hopkins and the University of Southern California.
But Penn public safety officials and experts in the field alike say that the statistics may be misleading.
Rush said that, in reporting crime, Penn often goes beyond the requirements of the Clery Act, a law passed in 1998 that outlines procedures for crime reporting on college campuses.
Johns Hopkins Investigations Coordinator Steve Ossmus, meanwhile, said that while Johns Hopkins may not report beyond Clery Act standards, the school does follow the statute strictly in reporting crime.
But Penn Criminology professor Lawrence Sherman said that "Penn counts a lot more robberies [off campus] as Penn robberies than most other schools in the country."
Because of differences in reporting, he added, "these national crime statistics on college crime are not worth a damn."
"We get beat up because we're honest," Rush said.
Catherine Bath, executive director of Security on Campus -- a non-profit advocate for campus safety -- said that only about half of universities across the country are in full compliance with the Clery Act, ultimately giving communities a false impression of campus safety.
"Penn doesn't pretend that crime doesn't happen two blocks off campus," Bath added.
But while it may be difficult to tell how safe a university campus actually is compared to others, officials have continued exploring ways to make it more secure.
Technology
With the installation of closed-circuit surveillance cameras in 1997, the University took its first step to conquering crime through technological means.
Now, nine years later, Gutmann's $5 million pledge has allowed the division to increase the number of cameras around campus to 76.
The high speed, pan-tilt cameras are "state-of-the-art," with the capability to zoom from over two blocks away and shift to black and white in low-light situations for clarity purposes, Penn Security and Technical Services Director Domenic Ceccanecchio said.
Other urban schools seem to share the belief that cameras can effectively deter crime, and some are taking the idea further.
USC is planning to install 72 cameras with facial-recognition technology outside buildings and at intersections around campus, Public Safety Captain Gloria Graham said.
Johns Hopkins is also attempting to implement advances in camera capabilities, with the installation of 46 cameras that are able to recognize up to 16 suspicious actions, alerting security when one of the programmed behaviors is caught on tape, Ossmus said.
While Penn has examined such options, Ceccanecchio said that behavior-recognition cameras are more appropriate for airports, where there is a more controlled environment.
He added that the cameras are not sophisticated enough to distinguish someone falling from a person simply lying down. "Every event would become an alarm event and it would just be a madhouse trying to differentiate between [that] and just a regular activity," he said.
While Ceccanecchio added that the option of installing even more advanced technology -- such as iris scans and fingerprint identification -- is always on the table, he said that no product will be put to use until officials can ensure its effectiveness.
Still, the question remains whether security cameras are an efficient use of resources.
University of Chicago Police Executive Director Rudy Nimocks said, "I don't think any university has ever proved they can work as a deterrent to crime."
Southern Illinois criminology professor Dave Kauzlarich agreed, saying that the criminal mindset often does not take into account the threat of surveillance.
"Unless people are convinced that cameras are there all the time, they're not going to do much in terms of preventing crime," he said.
Crime-Prevention Philosophy
Penn has also been one of the leading universities in the country in taking crime prevention into its own hands. The University has had an independent, armed police force in place since the 1970s.
Rush said that an independent police force is vital in furthering one of the division's main goals -- visibility in the community.
"It's proven that police is more effective when it's local," Kauzlarich said. "Do you want a centralized force that knows nothing about the nature of your neighborhood? No."
While USC and Chicago share the philosophy of needing an independent police force, Columbia and Johns Hopkins have gone in the opposite direction, only employing security guards and relying on city police officers for law enforcement.
Columbia employs about 100 security guards and supplements that number with contracted guards when necessary. Columbia Vice President of Public Safety James McShane said that the university is confident in the abilities of the New York City Police Department.
The NYPD "has led the country in crime reduction and has been a leader in developing new crime-fighting techniques," he said. "I'm comfortable to rely on them."
Ossmus said that Johns Hopkins outfits its security guards in fluorescent green uniforms to maintain high visibility and augments the security force with off-duty police officers.
The measures have proven effective in preventing crime, Ossmus said.
Kauzlarich added that fencing and distinct entry points around campus -- such as Columbia has -- can often compensate for the lack of the police force.
"The more defined the space, the easier it is to protect," he said.
McShane said that the monitored entrances and exits on Columbia's campus limits the number of ways potential criminals can enter campus, which has led to a decrease in on-campus crime.
However, Sherman cautioned that doing so can cause a negative stigma in the community.
In that setting, "once you leave the protection of those walls, you might encounter a community that has hostility and anger directed towards you," he said, adding that "the best security solutions win over the hearts and minds and don't just try to keep out the bodies."
Community Outreach
While schools may differ in the resources spent on policing or technology, most experts in the field of criminology agree that preventing crime means attacking the problem's source -- disadvantaged communities.
"Putting a Band-Aid on the problem is less preferential than solving the root of the problem," Kauzlarich said.
Officials at Penn's Division of Public Safety have credited much of the last decade's crime decrease in former President Judith Rodin's establishment of the West Philadelphia Initiative and other community-outreach programs.
Penn's Center for Community Partnerships is currently involved in 16 programs with the goals of "addressing universal issues like poor schooling, inadequate health care and high degrees of poverty" and to "affect crime both in the immediate context and in the long run," center Director Ira Harkavy said.
Other schools have followed Penn's lead in focusing on the community in fighting crime. USC has mandated that fraternities and sororities clean up roads on campus while Chicago -- like Penn -- has been involved in the educational process at local schools.
But Penn, which in 1985 became the first school to establish university-assisted community schools, is ahead of the pack, Sherman says.
"We can always put more effort into building knowledge about the nature of the problems and the possible solutions," he said. "But I would venture to say that Penn is doing a lot more of that than any other university."
