Is Georgia State a safe campus? This is a question that has been asked so many times, I’m sure you’re tired of hearing it. But here we are again, another crime on campus, another bullshit “we’re doing everything we can” type of answer. The problem is the same as it has always been. The Georgia State campus is located in the middle of downtown, so that means we get crime that a traditional college located in the suburbs or a rural area of town might not get just based on population and accessibility.
But when will our university police get a grip on the rampant crime that’s so long plagued Atlanta’s urban wilderness. I’m sure the GSU Police Department does everything in its power to prevent downtown crime from leaking into campus, but too often it seems like they only act after it has already happened, not stop it from happening in the first place.
The Georgia State University Police Department has our phone number. Their lines have been trilling from news media ever since last Thursday, when a gun toter allegedly robbed a Georgia State student of his phone and laptop. The fact that we aren’t safe in the library on a thursday morning is unacceptable.
The university’s student body president, Sebastian Parra, told The Signal last week that the firearm scare has the Panther Family on edge. So he’s been chatting with GSUPD’s crime prevention specialist, Sgt. Sharon Ware, to hone in on the source of the drama.
We’ve badgered Ware’s office on a slew of issues, from safety spending to parking deck delinquency. We’ve interrogated good cops, bad cops and every measure of law enforcement in between. We even called them out for overlooking key evidence in a theft case a few months back.
So are we staring down the barrel of our university’s security safeguard blunders? Or has this fervor for news of gun violence oversaturated our student body’s conscious to the brink of fear? A myriad of local news media armed headlines with words such as “gunpoint,” “armed,” or “firearm.”
However, suspicion of the alleged perp’s weaponry stems only from the victim of the Jan 14 robbery. So do we need metal detectors — as Parra and Ware have brainstormed — at the library’s entrances? What the hell are those big gates we have to cross through? And how did Thursday’s suspect check in and out of the library? Hopping turnstiles?
