A summary of Eastern Michigan University’s crime statistics dating from 2008-2010 has been released, showing minor improvements and setbacks.
The categories in the report, including murder, criminal sexual conduct, robbery and motor vehicle theft among others, mostly show single-digit cases. For that reason, common tendencies and causes cannot be easily identified.
“When you’re talking about so few incidents, it’s hard to compare that in a trend,” Interim Deputy Chief Jeff Nesmith said. “The changes are pretty flat. If we saw a spike in numbers — like something doubled — that’d be a significant change. But we don’t have teams that deal with certain incidents. We deal with cases as they come in.”
One area Nesmith could speak for was burglary. Since 2008, on-campus burglary cases have decreased from 47 to 42 and, most recently, to 29. A subset of on-campus numbers representing dorms and apartments shows the numbers decreased from 32 to 13.
Nesmith said this is due to efforts made by the Department of Public Safety.
“There has really been a lot of effort over the past couple years,” he said. “We’ll go around and look for doors that aren’t locking properly and then check that doors are locked at night. It’s been 4 a.m. before when we’ve found unlocked doors and we’ll say, ‘Hey, your door’s unlocked. Why don’t you come lock it?’ ”
Recent university attempts, Nesmith explained, will be mostly reflected in the 2011 statistics.
Instead of traditional brass keys, residents in Phelps, Sellers, Walton and Putnam Halls have unlocked their dorm rooms with electronic key cards this fall. The new system, which cost $850,000, was installed during the summer to improve campus safety and security. Nesmith said there has been a considerably smaller amount of burglaries since then.
Hate crimes were absent in ’08 and ’09, but two were reported in ’10; one incident of destruction/damage/vandalism of property on campus characterized by religious bias and one by sexual orientation bias.
Arrests have become more frequent, however. For example, the number of on-campus arrests for possession of illegal weapons has increased steadily over the past three years, rising from zero to one to two. The number of liquor law violations in apartments or dorms has increased, along with on-campus drug law violations.
Despite the rise in medicinal marijuana near college towns like Ypsilanti, it cannot be directly linked to the rise in campus drug law violations.
“A lot of these cases are complaint driven,” Nesmith said, “so we’ll end up checking something out based on someone smelling marijuana… medical marijuana is sold certain places off campus, [but] it’s still prohibited on campus. We don’t have anything to tie into the dispensaries.”
Zero reports of on-campus arson were reported in 2008, while four were made in 2009 and three in 2010.
So far in 2011, one incident involving a student who set fire to a bathroom trash can in the Student Center was reported. Besides that, the year is off to a good start, Nesmith said.
“We haven’t had to send out many timely warnings yet, so I think that’s a positive sign,” he said.
Mass notifications and emergency alerting tests are scheduled regularly. On Sept. 30, 2010, 96.39 percent of subscribers received a text from University Communications, and 98.86 percent of faculty, staff and students who signed up were sent an email message.
For both messaging formats, 95 percent of the users received notification in less than 5 minutes. By Sept. 23 of this year, text message alerts improved drastically, but email alerts did not.
