Locked Out in the Cold, Sarah’s Story

By: Brianna Warrant

It was a piercingly cold, -3-degree, Valentine’s Day morning in Ithaca, New York. With a high of only 3 degrees that day, the bitter air made it unbearable to stand outside for long, numbing any exposed appendage by a single step outside. In their warmly heated dorm rooms, Ithaca College students were sound asleep to recharge for the next long day ahead of them.

Ithaca College freshman, who we will call Sarah Tyler, had a peculiar dream in the early morning. At around 4 a.m., she dreamt that she slipped her moccasins on, walked out of her dorm room and headed towards the stairs of Hilliard Hall. She then walked down the three flights of stairs and walked outside of her dorm into the parking lot. Hearing a door close behind her, she opened her eyes. In shock, she realized that the dream was actually reality.  Wearing only her sleep attire: boxer shorts, a t-shirt and moccasins, she began to panic.

As she left the warmth of her dorm, unknowingly, she did not have her student I.D., phone, or watch, leaving her with no way to get back into her dorm. Quickly thinking of her options, Sarah ran from the exit door that she walked out of to the main entrance at the front of her dorm. 

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She then spots an emergency phone box connected to the left of the main entrance door and decides to take advantage of this safety system implemented by the school. “There are instructions on the phone, making it very easy to figure out how to use it. I dialed the number for the Office of Public Safety and it didn’t work, so I tried dialing 911 and still nothing worked,” Sarah said.

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After realizing that the only method to contacting help was not working, she began to scream and make lots of noise to get attention from inside. She tried this method, along with running back and forth between doors for about two hours, but to Sarah it felt like eternity.

With everyone peacefully sleeping, no one heard. “I heard banging and screaming but I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” a resident of Sarah’s dorm stated. Sarah also said, “I didn’t sound like someone who was stuck outside, I probably sounded more like a murderer than anything.”

She was left frozen on this chilling February morning of winter, lost and helpless.

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To create more noise, Sarah decided to bang on the glass door with her foot, shattering the glass in the process. An R.A. heard the glass shattering and quickly ran to see what all the commotion was about. She rescued Sarah from the bitterness and helplessness incident that she was stuck in and led her safely back into her room. 

Sarah Tyler is a freshman business major at Ithaca College. She is also on the Women’s Lacrosse team. She has not had a sleep walking problem in her recent teen years. “Me and my brother both did as children, but it went away,” she said. 

Apart from sleep walking, Sarah suffers from a condition called Raynaud's syndrome which makes her body more prone to being cold and numb with frostbite from low temperatures.

These factors make her situation even more unexpected and dangerous for it to occur. 

Soon after the incident, officers from the Office of Public Safety showed up to her door to see if the destruction of property was on purpose or not. After telling them her story, they asked why she didn’t walk to Public Safety or hit one of the 90 blue lights around campus. 

“I’ve never heard of the blue lights in my life,” Sarah said: “I’m not thinking of that when I have adrenaline kicking. Plus, I was not dressed properly and walking away from my dorm would’ve been painful. Who knows who could’ve been outside that I would approach in the long walk to the Public Safety office.” 

According to the Office of Public Safety and Emergency Management: “Blue-light telephones provide, with the touch of a button, direct and immediate voice contact with Public Safety. While the dispatcher is receiving information from the caller, a computer identifies the location of the telephone from which the call is being made, and an officer is sent to assist the caller.”

Also according to the Emergency Readiness and Response Guide, “Every member of our campus community plays a role in an emergency: foremost is knowing what to do and where to go for instruction and guidance.

Students being unaware of the blue light system is a common occurrence that happens among all freshman, especially this semester when freshman were unable to have an orientation when they came on campus because of COVID-19. Due to the piercingly bright light, they can be seen anywhere but most students do not notice them as much as Ithaca College might think they do. This raises a problem because the blue light and emergency phone systems were implemented to provide an outlet and sense of comfort when there is potential danger.

This photo showing the locations of all 90 blue-light systems throughout campus was provided by the Ithaca College Interactive Campus Map

“If I wanted to fix anything I would want to inform people of blue lights more because freshmen aren’t going to know what that is,” said Sarah.

In Sarah’s case, she was aware of the emergency phone, but did not receive the help that she desperately needed to save her. “I could’ve been kidnapped or raped that night, anything could’ve happened,” Sarah stated, “If the phone worked that would’ve saved me instantly.”

The Office of Public Safety did confirm that the phone at Sarah’s dorm was in fact broken and were quick to fix it. But this was not the first time that an emergency phone was broken while students were on campus. 

On March 13, 2021, the Emergency Notification System sent out a campus-wide email stating that the phones were currently down. This lasted for around two days. If there was a case of emergency during this time, no student would be able to reach help if they did not have their phone on them. This poses the question of how often Ithaca College does maintenance checks on these systems. 

According to an article from TCA Regional News in Chicago, there was a mass shooting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Barton College and Wilson Community College, who have institutions of higher learning practices by having regular active shooter drills, responded to this tragedy by having a moment of silence. 

Jessica Bailey, director of marketing and public relations for Wilson Community College stated that: “We review general safety and security procedures during new student orientation and in the required college success course. In spring 2016 the college conducted a full-scale active shooter simulation on campus in cooperation with local first responder agencies, in part to familiarize them with our campus.”

Along with this, “Barton conducts monthly Safety and Security Task Force meetings, which include representatives from faculty, staff, and students on campus,” said a spokesman for Barton College.

Knowing that other colleges, such as Wilson Community College and Barton College, implement regular drills and maintenance checks, and Ithaca College stresses the knowledge of where to go in an incident, a problem is raised when most freshmen are unaware of the systems implemented to help them and there is not enough education with incoming freshmen during this COVID-19 pandemic. 

With many areas of Ithaca College’s campus not having cameras, these systems are the best way to keep students safe and comfortable while being on campus. With that being said, this poses the question of how safe are students when these systems are broken?

What The Data Says And What Public Safety Says

By Connor Ahern

Every day, students at Ithaca College attend class, make plans with friends, work on assignments in common areas and exercise outside. While life goes on normally for most, some students will return to their dorms or cars to find that they have been broken into. Other students may be assaulted while out alone. Creating a safe and healthy atmosphere for students is important, and some may wonder: “Is there more that Public Safety could do to protect us?”

To assess what more can be done, the amount of criminal offenses must first be known. Crime statistics at Ithaca College are higher than average compared to other schools. On a ranking of criminal offenses by universities, the college is tied at the 28th spot in New York and is at the 422nd spot nationally, with 1 being the highest number of criminal offenses. To clarify, that is rank 28 out of 146 and rank 422 out of 2756. For a better understanding of the college’s crime levels, data has been pulled from two other schools similar to it. Cornell University is the first, because it is in the same city. The second is Hofstra University, which is similar to Ithaca College in size, cost and it is in New York, so it falls under the same laws. 

Data from https://ope.ed.gov/campussafety/#/

The numbers immediately mark that Cornell has the highest rate of crime, but Cornell has a larger student body, around 22,000 students, which is over three times more than Ithaca College’s ~6,500 and more than twice Hofstra’s ~10,000. Changing the data to be more proportional is important to understanding how common criminal offenses there are at IC.

Data from https://ope.ed.gov/campussafety/#/

Therefore, according to the data, the average IC student is more likely to commit or experience rape, burglary, motor vehicle theft or arson than students from Hofstra or Cornell, which both have larger populations. Campus disciplinary actions are considered separate statistics from criminal offenses. Similar distribution is true for this data pool

Data from https://ope.ed.gov/campussafety/#/

In this case, however, Ithaca College’s rates are very high without them being proportional to the population.

Data from https://ope.ed.gov/campussafety/#/

Ithaca College is the highest of these three in all groups, but there is a lot to consider regarding the data and how it was collected. Maybe Ithaca College is better at reporting and catching crime, so its numbers are more accurate. Maybe Cornell and Hofstra have lower rates of reporting. 

That being said, the Public Safety Office at IC was open to answering some questions regarding crime on campus. Thomas Dunn, the Associate Director and Deputy Chief of Public Safety at Ithaca College, says, in short, that they are doing all they can. And with COVID-19 altering the population of the college and how operations on campus are conducted, rates are lower than normal.

Dunn said that burglary rates on campus appear to be lower than when campus is full. He attributes this decrease to less visitors on campus. When something is reported stolen, there is no way to tell if it was somebody off-campus or on-campus. 

“It would lend itself to logically think that less outsiders coming onto the campus has an impact on our operations,” Dunn said.

He said campus patrolling has not changed since the pandemic, with officers patrolling the grounds regularly. He also made a point that Residential Life is a vital part of their operations in keeping the campus safe and secure. He said having students monitor security in buildings is a huge asset to Public Safety, which includes the Student Auxiliary Safety Patrol (SASP), who operate outside of residences. 

In the event that a crime happens to somebody, Dunn said he wants people to report it, even if they do not think it can be fixed, or that their stolen items can be recovered. It helps them learn patterns and potentially catch people who repeatedly commit crimes with the same MO. There are plenty of reactive measures that Public Safety has, many of them being filling out forms to report crimes or other offenses. Proactive measures to prevent crime are limited, though, with active patrols and witnessing students being the only deterrents to criminals. 

“Another type of crime would be someone in the dining hall, probably a more frequent example,” Dunn said. “They put their food down, they put their wallet or purse down, they go back to get a drink. They come back. They were only gone a minute, but your phone or your wallet could be stolen in that blink of an eye. We want to encourage people to be secure and safe.”

Naturally this leads to questions about having cameras, and if cameras were on campus, would they be a helpful tool for preventing or solving crimes?

The first issue with putting cameras up around campus is privacy. Cameras must be in public spaces, and how those are defined can vary. A dorm lounge is public in a sense, but can toe the line of privacy because it is in a living space. 

“We have always considered putting up cameras,” Dunn said. “If a series of crimes are being committed in one area, could you put up a camera? Yes. But one, they are costly. Two, and this is putting on my police and my attorney hat for a conviction. Sometimes you can get a good surveillance picture. And unfortunately it shows a person, a six-foot, white male with a blue sweatshirt that says ‘Ithaca’ on it, wearing a ball-cap.”

He used this example to show that most cameras will often have low quality images of people who look and dress average. These people are hard to distinguish in low resolution. The issue lies in the reactionary security that Public Safety practices. Patrols on car and foot are the only forms of proaction they take to prevent crime. Dunn was skeptical of the viability of using cameras as a deterrent, but Urban Institute put out a studythat says otherwise.

UI’s study showed that, in Baltimore and Chicago, they saved city police hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and reduced crime rates in certain areas. Another study by MTASfound that cameras worked best in conjunction with other deterrents. There is no way to know for sure if cameras will work for IC unless cameras are put up to see results.

The conversation did not leave much hope for cameras being put on campus, but the amount of patrolling and reporting that does occur lends itself the idea that IC is very thorough at reporting crime. According to the Cornell Sun as of February, Cornell was in the process of equipping 34 cameras across historic areas on campus. On Hofstra’s campus, there are no reported cameras. All three schools do employ the use of emergency phones scattered across their campuses. Whether all of the measures that the school takes are enough will never be certain, but it is clear that Ithaca personnel are devoted to protecting students on campus. If you see something, report it. Because no progress can be made any other way. Students do need to take measures to protect themselves and their community, even if it is just reporting crime.