Crime on campus is down so far this year after the fall and early winter were marked by a rash of robberies and two shootings.
There have been nine robberies so far this semester. Last semester, there were 38 total.
The overall crime rate during the first few months of 2006 is also down three percent from the same period last year.
Police officials said that a recent area of concern, however, is retail theft, which has shown an increase since last year.
Vice President of Public Safety Maureen Rush attributes the overall drop to initiatives begun earlier this year, which have increased the number of armed officers, security guards, surveillance cameras and lighting in the area.
University President Amy Gutmann pledged $5 million to support these initiatives in January, following an incident where a student was shot in the leg.
"The fact that we are neck-and-neck with last year compared with what was happening at the beginning of the semester is the significant change," Rush said, adding that this would not have occurred without the added initiatives.
But Penn Criminology professor Lawrence Sherman said that the crime decrease may instead be a result of outside factors.
"The weather makes a difference," he said. "Since late January, February and March have been colder months, it could have helped any crime decrease."
Sherman added, however, that this doesn't mean the new security measures are not having an effect.
PennComm Director Mitch Yanak, who manages records for Penn safety officials, said that auto thefts and car break-ins are also down 60 and 36 percent, respectively.
But despite the crime decreases, Yanak said that the division is utilizing crime maps and other technologies to monitor the surrounding areas closely to prevent crime from shifting toward the Penn campus.
"We don't only concern ourselves with what's going on in the Penn community," Yanak said. "If you're the culprits [in one area], you're going to move somewhere else. We don't want them to move into our area."
Penn is "the Field of Dreams," Rush said. "If you build it, people come, and some people come who we wish didn't come."
Sherman added that no matter what Penn does to address safety concerns, some crimes will persist until larger issues involving urban environments are addressed.
"We just don't have a national government that treats crime as a scientific problem," Sherman said. "The University of Pennsylvania can't solve the problem. We need national leadership to solve that problem."
