In response, we have assigned additional officers to the area in marked and unmarked cars. These officers will join the additional four extra patrol cars serving the areas of the neighborhood close to the University that were dispatched in June...
This is a very serious incident that highlights the need to continue enhancing our efforts to increase safety for all those who study, work, visit, and live in the area. Recent efforts to reduce crime in the area have proven effective and data show a significant decrease in crime, but we realize we must do more to improve the security of our neighborhood.
We are also working with the University of Chicago Police, the Dean of Students Office, and all of the University's leadership to ensure appropriate resources are provided to support individuals who experience acts of crime or violence.
I have no complaints against efforts to catch more criminals. It hardly needs stating that crime is lowered when criminals are caught, and caged, and sterilized. But other trends in the University of Chicago Police Department's policies regarding the community disturb me, especially in my more contemplative moods. Take, for instance, this sign posted outside our venerable place of employment, near where I have my morning, mid-morning, beginning of lunch, end of lunch, mid-afternoon, and, on rare occasions, my early evening coffees and cigarettes:
Yes, that's correct: the U of C police--though without a doubt the priority for medical emergencies (after the Student Care Center), public disturbance calls, and rides to class when one has sprained his left ankle almost beyond repair--can be counted on to steal your bike (if locked to the rails near the aforementioned cigarette niche).
Remember what Nietzsche has written about the Homeric heroes: courageous, generous, often even affable, yet sure to gore an occasional steward with a spear through the upper quadriceps if provoked beyond propriety. What the U of C police have done to the student population in Hyde Park is, with negligible difference, a similar debilitation through ostensible protection. For with their insatiable appetite for bikes, a fact the all-knowing administrators of Regenstein have noted and accordingly advertised to unsuspecting library patrons, they have effectively demanded the students' best means to escape crime as tribute for their own efforts in fighting it. The average University of Chicago student, as I've deduced through careful observation, needs 6.5 seconds to sprint 40 yards. Provided a paper is due, we may often witness this time drop below even 6 seconds. Yet in comparison with the infamous speed of Hyde Park Criminals, the average of U of Cer making his way through Nichols Park is a duck in water. Many times I've sat by the jungle gym and watched a purse-snatcher in gazelle-like gallops pick off a horrified first-year, in turn without time even to pause his iPod Shuffle.
My point is this: we must throw off the yoke of our pirate protectors, recover our bikes, and refuse to walk anywhere. It is self-delusion to believe that running like hell will get us far in the struggle against marginally-declining Hyde Park crime. No, we must ride like hell, under our own power or in the care of highly-trained CTA bus drivers. Also, we must be careful to travel in packs. In this way I am confident that Hyde Park's residents may learn again to live without fear, whether of bandits or of the very officials trusted to defend us against them.
4 comments:
Like George Bernard Shaw, if no one wishes to make a comment, I will have to do so myself:
I take offense at your comment about criminals. Do you honestly recommend sterilization? And isn't "ghetto" a particularly charged word to use in describing several blocks of middle-class housing, whether inhabited by students, auto mechanics, or cockroaches?
All I mean to say is, if this is irony, it trips up on itself and demands further context. You've taken the U of C police force, a committed, competent, and already underappreciated guarantor of safe student life, and you've made it the object of jest, for the sake of a silly (and insufferably boring) library blog. Luckily, I am necessarily aware that there is no need to exhort you to quit your day job, since your opportunity to paint these walls with your bile depends on that other, inconsequential, mindless occupation.
Dear Reader,
My sister has a term for moments like this. She says, she says...Oh, yes! "Chillax!" As in, it's a library blog, write something constructive, or find a more worthwhile way to spend your time, doofus. Though I can see by your use of adverbs that someone has bought you an education, you've missed some key formal subleties to my post. Only the most glaring is this: nowhere do I recommend sterilizing criminals. I say rather that the unskilled criminals, that is, those who are caught, and caged, must then be sterilized. The good criminals are gonna breed like rabbits for as long as they desire, at least while I'm Dictator. And even I admit that on some very rare occasions the offspring of criminals are not themselves criminals. No reason to deny them life, I say (provided they have a clean record through the juvenile years). Before you rip my comments out of context again, Buster, take a second for your cool University wits to run over the text again, and maybe get in another game of Sudoku, McFly...
The whole thing with the signs was due to the University getting clamped down on their handling of accessibility issues. In order to be ADA compliant, they had to make sure that the handrails around the University were usable for people with disabilities, thus the facilities folks get the task of cutting bike locks of those bikes locked up on the handrails, which they then send over to the Police for folks to retreive...
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