A deeper dive into women’s safety on campus.
If you’re a student or faculty member at UIC, UIC ALERT, the campus’ crime reporting software, is familiar to you. UIC ALERT is a program that sends a message to an individual’s phone number and email, informing them about a crime happening nearby or on campus. While it can be helpful at times, it has flaws in achieving long-term effects on reported danger on campus.
Ever since the tragedy that struck Ruth George, the safety of women on campus has been a topic that more students are focused on. Ruth George was a 19-year-old sophomore at UIC in November 2019, when she was sexually assaulted and killed in a UIC parking garage. She is a daily reminder of the importance of safety on campus. While UIC has done its part in increasing safety on campus by implementing emergency centers, UIC Police, walking escorts, and transportation systems, its strategy of handling students’ physical safety and notifying students still needs improvement in its current state.
Mia Peric, a fifth-year student, has been a student at UIC since August 2019, and she has seen almost no change. Peric said she “remember[s] more security guards standing around” but hadn’t seen much else, especially regarding their safety procedures. Peric said she remembers being introduced to the night rides, call poles, and all of the same protocols UIC currently has, before the Ruth George tragedy at her orientation in the summer of 2019 (UIC Safety).
Currently, UIC has a student body of around 34 thousand; we are one of the largest campuses in Illinois, yet we rank 40th in safety (Niche College Safety). Being in a city as big and crime-heavy as Chicago, UIC has room to improve. Within the past month, UIC has had two separate instances involving robberies within or near the Academic and Residential Complex (ARC), with UIC only informing students through one email after the attack, with the label “[URGENT],” with no further known action taken towards notifying or working towards increasing or improving student safety procedures.
As a woman myself, I do not always feel safe walking on campus during dark hours, and I am not the only one. Tess Wyniemko, a 3rd-year student, has to take extra precautions constantly because of how she feels on campus.
“I really try to think about who I can walk with or making sure that I’m not alone,” Wyniemko says. “Especially when I lived in a dorm.” She said, while detailing an incident she had while living on campus during her first year. “I got off at the UIC stop, like the one near ARC, and there was a man that had been following me and my friend for a couple of… stops. [W]e were walking through campus, and he was just following us and… there was no one else around, so it’s kind of scary…[W]e all just went the way up to our dorm, and then he sat on the bench outside the dorm.” She and her friend reported him to their front desk, but were not notified if it had been filed or if any other action was taken thereafter. They had just waited and watched for him to leave.
On February 28, 2024, a robbery occurred inside a campus building at 6 pm on a Wednesday. A perpetrator entered the ARC with a knife and used said weapon to force two different students to give him money before fleeing the scene. Then, on March 16, 2024, a perpetrator sexually assaulted a nonaffiliated victim and took their valuables in front of the ARC. Both instances were reported on, with no known filing done to identify the perpetrators after the fact.
As a commuter student, Peric must take the Blue Line daily. “You get used to it,” she said when thinking about the safety precautions she implements in her daily life. “I think of myself as a very aware person; you kind of have to be as a woman. I keep my eyes forward, and I stay out of the way.” But what happens when that isn’t enough?
One of UIC’s advantages, however, is the number of students on campus most days. Both Wyniemko and Peric agree about safety in numbers. “I usually just feel safer, like when people are around me,” Peric says, commenting on her experience walking between buildings. “With classes so late into the day, even though it’s dark at four o’clock, people leave campus around six o’clock, so I’m never really alone.” She emphasized that it was one of the things that made her the most comfortable: feeling like someone around her would be able to report a crime, should she ever be a victim.
In an attempt to find a solution, I asked if they had suggestions, anything UIC could do to help. “A card swipe system wouldn’t be bad,” Wyniemko said, “everyone is expected to have their I-card with them anyways,” but Peric thinks “there’s too much foot traffic, some buildings get so busy so fast, and people leave in masses,” making a swipe system inconvenient for long-term implementation. While they both have valid points, I do agree with Wyniemko, as it could be a policy incorporated into the rules more seamlessly. If it became a school-wide rule to have your student ID on campus, it would be normalized for all students to use it to get into buildings.
To understand why something like this hadn’t been implemented, I contacted UIC’s police department through their email service to ask if they were discussing potential budget changes, any new security measures, or even a swipe-in system, but unfortunately, I did not receive a response from them on the topic. Then, I turned to Google. Why hadn’t they thought of any of this? A security officer at UIC gets paid a salary of 61k to 81k, and as UIC only has 13%, about 530k, of its budget dedicated to income, it does not leave enough room to hire and pay the salary of more UIC security unless they relocate some of the budget (UIC Budget).
A guard monitoring the card swiping system would be the best way to ensure people are not letting others in without swiping, but even without one, it would encourage more of a safety standard. According to the UIC barcode, the cost for a swipe-in device is about $420; with about 12 of them being bought and installed in major buildings around campus, it could cost up to $5k, which could be too much to set aside despite UIC’s 2.5 billion dollar budget. However, UIC currently has a “Campus Violence Prevention Committee,” which was formed in late 2022 and is focused on documenting and reporting crimes happening on and around campus. They act as a student patrol system, similar to a student police. Their newest effort is their “Identify, Assess, and Manage” method, which focuses more on repeat offenders by recognizing patterns in crime happening around campus; they are making real efforts towards a safer UIC experience.
UIC has a lot of room to grow when it comes to on-campus security and safety. While improvements are slowly being established, UIC still has plenty of room to grow in the ways they handle safety and security, and students are the ones suffering.