{Flashback – travel with me.} It's 1:45 a.m. and my shift as design chief at the Kansan is finally over. As I reach for my cell phone to call my overprotective boyfriend who stays up to come pick me up on campus, I breathe a sigh of relief. Some students aren't so lucky to have such a great boyfriend who will stay up and drive at 2 a.m. in the middle of chilly November. I think of a dear friend of mine who weighs half my body weight and lives in the student ghetto. She justifies her 2 a.m. walks home because she doesn't "really live that far."
Two years ago, a good friend of mine came home from a night out to find a naked 6'4" 200-something-pound male passed out on the floor of her bedroom. One of her drunken roommates had forgotten to lock the front door. The intruder had lived in the apartment the year before (He was so drunk that he forgot he didn't live there anymore, got inside, and passed out). The next year, the apartment was broken into and five roommates worth of electronics and valuables were stolen. Bad luck you say? Stay out of the ghetto you say? Perhaps, or maybe it could have been prevented if Lawrence, KU & KUJH TV took a step towards making their residents and audience aware of the crime and danger in our community.
Amazing to think that we could actually have a police blotter set up on KUJH and see what's really going down like the one on chicagocrime.org. The maps are also a very convenient factor of the site. I think that if students were aware of other more well lit routes to campus, they would take them. Of course there is always Jaywalk and Safe Ride, but students can't always wait around for others.
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