On Oct. 9 at 12:45 a.m. a student placed a call to Safety and Security from the Fayerweathers. She requested a ride back from A-lot. The Safety and Security officer who answered the phone asked that she hold on for one moment. He moved the phone away from his ear, laughed and then yelled, "Someone wants a ride. Do we do this?"
Safety and Security's escort service is something the Dartmouth administration is proud of. I remember first hearing about it when I visited the campus during the fall of my senior year of high school. My mother asked about campus rape and assault statistics. The woman moderating the information session told her about walking escorts, rides back from on-campus locations after dark and the blue lights on the emergency telephones scattered across campus.
She was pleased to pacify my anxious parent with the assurance that although Hanover is a relatively safe community, Dartmouth College was ready to make sure that nothing would endanger her child's well-being.
But how efficient is this system of crime prevention? In the situation I described above, the student was eventually asked to call from A-lot. "We don't make appointments," the dispatcher told her. "There's a phone in the third row there. It's in a brown box. You can't miss it."
Unfortunately, this student did miss the phone. She had called Safety and Security from the her dormitory because she was apprehensive about remaining in the lot alone for any length of time. She ended up walking herself home because of the frustration involved in simply being safe.
After hearing this story, I went to examine the phone in A-lot. This might be considered the most dangerous of the spots with an emergency phone because of its isolation. However the phone was effectively buried in the depths of the parking lot. The box was green, not brown, by night. And regardless of exact color, it was practically invisible in a nighttime haze of dark colors.
There was also no light on the box, which I imagine makes it nearly useless for emergency purposes. A student who already knows exactly where the phone is would surely have no trouble finding it. But it is unlikely that a frightened co-ed would "happen upon" a dark phone in a dark night. This eventuality is found only in movies with happy endings.
This student's experience is, of course, one isolated incident, but there have been other times when Safety and Security did less than come through on the promises it has given to thousands of worried parents like mine. On a separate occasion, another female student requesting a ride was told that there were too few officers on duty that evening to provide an escort. This situation should never occur.
Last Sunday evening, having heard stories such as these from women all over the campus, I decided to run Safety and Security through my own test. I drove to A-lot with a friend. We called from the phone there.
The woman I spoke to was courteous and efficient. She asked me my name, told me to wait in the car with my headlights on, and thanked me for calling. Fifteen minutes later a Safety and Security van with an equally affable driver had pulled up by our car.
I would like to think that my experience is the rule and not the exception in the way Safety and Security protects students. But even if this is the case, in matters of crime prevention, there should never be any exceptions. The phone in A-lot should have a blue light. And every student should be taken care of as I was.
The title Safety and Security conveys two interdependent messages: "Safety" implies we are free from danger, and "security" connotes freedom from anxiety . As the song says, "You can't have one without the other." The young woman who walked home alone had neither.
