Crime on Campus

At the University of Minnesota, like I assume on many campuses, every time there is a crime in which the police believe there is a threat to the public, they send out an email alert. We seem to have gotten more of these Crime Alerts this fall than I recall in years past.

To examine this, I went to the UMN Police website and looked at the archived crime alerts for the last year.

• Current: http://www1.umn.edu/police/alerts.html
• Archived: http://www1.umn.edu/police/archivedcrimealerts.html

While I can't access past last October (2012), it does seem that they are up a bit. To be clear, these alerts only seem to cover assault and robbery. (Overall, crime is down from last year, based on the data from their log.) I also plotted on a Google map where the 13 crime alerts took place. Note that one is in the exact same location as another so there are only 12 locations mapped.

A day or two after I mapped this, there was a story on Minnesota Public Radio about how extra police patrols would be around the University of Minnesota area after robberies had targeted students [Read story].