Hazard around Campus

Jinhyun Kim

Recently around Georgia Tech campus, a number of robberies happened on tech students and drew concerns on students, family of the students, and faculty members. Since these crimes happened very lately and without much time gap between them, these are more seriously shown by news. According to the article on the Georgia Tech school newspaper Technique, since June of 2009, there were "seven armed robberies have been reported on and off-campus", which was only about five months of time period.

The fact that these crimes are happening right around our Georgia Tech campus is making many people in campus, especially students who live on campus and close to campus very disturbed. As well as, it is greatly affecting students in negative way. Students fear to go out to eat after school dining halls are closed, and they fear to have some physical exercise after long period of studying in the evening. While college students have a lot of things to do in the dorm, out of the dorm, in the school campus, and out of the campus, students’ activities around school at late time became very limited. Parents of students are also very worried about the safety issue in the campus community.

For the assurance of the campus safety for people at Georgia Tech, certain procedures should be taken by authorities. We already heard from Atlanta Police Department that there are more police officers assigned on and around the campus as described in the same article in Technique. School administrators should take a big step, also. They should inform the people about this issue and encourage more crime prevention campaign for students, visitors, and faculties more often and in detail.

I hope, by now, all the people involved in Georgia Tech campus realize and take it serious about this issue. Although the people with authorities in Georgia Tech will need to play significant role to prevent further crimes happening around the campus, every individual has responsibility to help not let that happen. Also, I hope that from next year on, Georgia Tech students who are on freshmen orientation do not have to hear too much about crime issue around school campus though individual’s crime prevention is still, always important.