March sees big rise in crime against persons

Crime against persons was up in March — a month which included 11 assaults and an armed robbery on two Penn students.

There were 13 crimes against persons — which encompass offenses like robbery and assault — which is up 30 percent from February and 550 percent from March 2012.

Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush said that the rise stems from the fact that the Division of Public Safety “is patrolling a public area,” and noted that most of the incidents were nowhere near the heart of campus.

Also included in the incidents were several domestic violence cases and incidents related to Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania patients acting violently as a result of medication.
On the subject of responding to crimes, though, Rush added, “We discuss every crime and dissect it.”

The first robbery of the year in the DPS patrol zone occurred in March. Two male students reported at about 1 a.m. on March 13 that they had been robbed with a gun on the 4200 block of Osage Avenue.

However, the two did not call the police until about 45 minutes after the robbery occurred, according to Rush. By this point, the suspect, a 26-year-old man not affiliated with the University, had been arrested following a second robbery at the intersection of 45th St. and Larchwood Ave.

Police then connected the two incidents by showing the two students photos of the suspect arrested in connection with the second robbery. No UPennAlert was sent out, Rush said, because the suspect was already in custody by the time DPS was aware of the incident.

Of the 11 assaults in March, four were labeled as aggravated assault, meaning that the injuries sustained were more severe than those consistent with simple assault.

Three of these, however, stemmed from one incident, when a 34-year-old unaffiliated man was arrested after a chain of incidents on March 12. In the span of an hour, he struck a 22-year-old female student in the face and knocked a 12-year-old female and her sister to the ground.

Much of the crimes against persons occurred in the first half of March before tapering off in the later half of the month. While Rush said that DPS did not do anything explicitly different, “every day we tweak our deployment.”

“By being aware of our community, we may see something that is a simple assault now, but could have been an aggravated assault or worse had we not intervened,” she added.
Among the complainants in March’s assault cases was one student, one Penn Police officer and three employees at HUP.

Crime against property — encompassing burglary and theft — was up only slightly this month, increasing from 40 incidents in February to 43 in March.

Rush said she was proud of the fact that bike thefts were down 80 percent compared with the same month last year, and the fact there were only eight arrests in March relating to retail thefts.

Rush credited the arrest of these people, some of whom she labeled as “serial criminals,” combined with DPS policing tactics, as helping cause the drop in retail thefts from February to March.

She also specifically noted an arrest made on March 28 in relation to package theft, which she said is an issue that has increased both in the DPS patrol zone and across the entire city of Philadelphia.

The incident she was referring to happened “as a result of officers on the streets and dispatchers in [the PennComm Operations Center] using” the area’s surveillance cameras. The end result was an unaffiliated 47-year-old male being arrested on 42nd Street after removing a package from a porch that was not his.

No matter what incident occurs, Rush says DPS followed a “problem-oriented policing model.”
She said that the department tries to “look at the issues and say, ‘How can we prevent that from happening in the future?’”

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