We shouldn’t have to depend on Twitter or another student to make us aware of crimes that happen on campus.
LSUPD investigated an attempted armed robbery that took place in the early morning of April 8. According to a report by The Daily Reveille, 53-year-old Curtis J Honore attempted to rob a woman at knife point in front of Pleasant Hall. She was able to escape, and he fled the scene before police arrived but was later spotted in front of Louie’s Cafe in another attempt to rob someone.
The suspect fled again on a bike but was detained and arrested by LSUPD at the Circle K on Highland Road.
Honore was charged by LSUPD with armed robbery and resisting arrest. In addition to those charges, he also was charged by Baton Rouge Police Department with aggravated assault.
This shouldn’t be news for anyone, but unfortunately it is for many.
It’s great that they were able to detain and take the suspect into custody, and it’s even better that the woman got away unharmed. But LSUPD missed a few steps — where was our emergency email or text message?
Yes, they placed it on their website, but there aren’t many students on LSUPD’s website all day refreshing it for the heck of it.
This isn’t an everyday trivial matter — it was important enough to make the local news stations. The LSU student community depends on its school police force to inform students when crimes take place on or around campus.
LSUPD’s website states, “In the event of a crisis situation, LSU will communicate vital information as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to provide the greatest safety for our students, faculty, staff and visitors.”
Not communicating with us is not efficient and is far from safe.
Then, the question becomes this — what is a crisis situation? It’s not defined on the website, but the LSU community received an emergency email/text for the armed robbery that took place on Jan. 30 in the parking lot of Kirby Smith Hall. So, armed robberies clearly fall under a “crisis situation,” as they should.
And even though it was spring break at the time of the April 8 incident, many people, like myself, were on campus for a variety of different reasons. It would’ve been helpful to have received an email about this incident that took place not too far from my dorm — rather than my boss telling me and someone tweeting about it.
It’s dangerous and can be extremely scary to be informed of crimes through social networks. Because you then have to wonder how accurate the information is and why you haven’t heard about it from a trusted source, such as LSUPD. If we can’t use Wikipedia for a research paper because of credibility, then we shouldn’t have to use Twitter to find out about on-campus crimes.
This leads me to question how dependable LSUPD actually is and if there are any other incidents that could have possibly taken place on campus that just weren’t reported to us.
LSUPD not notifying us is beyond unacceptable, no matter what their reason may be. We, as an LSU community, need to be able to depend on LSUPD to notify us in such events.
Clarke Perkins is a 19-year-old political science freshman from New Orleans. You can reach her on Twitter @ClarkePerkins.