After my house in Collegetown was broken into over Spring Break, I felt an overwhelming sense of vulnerability. Coming back to campus I expected my house to be a mess — the occasional garbage bag still in the trash, spilled drinks on the table — but what I didn’t expect was a list of electronics and jewelry that had been stolen from me and my roommates.

From conversations with friends who had also been burglarized last month, I recognized a clear pattern: university-wide crime increases when students are on break. In fact, since March 13 there have been at least six burglaries of Collegetown residences and five robberies on and off campus. Such glaring examples suggested Cornell University was experiencing an unexpected crime spree.

But sadly this was not the case. Crimes of this nature are standard during long vacations, according to Officer Don Hoyt of the Ithaca Police Department, who said that the level of burglary has been consistently high during Spring Break for the last few years. With students out of town for the week, perpetrators from Ithaca and neighboring towns exploit the empty Collegetown streets to loot and plunder student homes. Televisions, laptops, DVD players, and jewelry have all repeatedly been the goods of choice because of their light weight and commercial appeal. Unfortunately, students who remain in Ithaca over break find Ithaca far less safe as a ghost town than as a Collegetown. As such, by the time Cornellians return, many of their former possessions have made their way into pawn shops in the Commons or bidding markets on the Internet.

During my aggressive hunt for our stolen electronics, I visited several of the pawn shops in Downtown Ithaca and asked each employee at the register if there had been an increase in available merchandise between March 17th and March 23rd. Each shop owner starred me straight in the eye and responded with a resounding “No.” Quite cognizant of the legal ramifications of their answering in the affirmative, I took my personal investigation a step further and monitored the Ithaca area activity on CraigsList. Not surprisingly, the inventory of electronics in the Ithaca sharply increased during Cornell’s Spring Break.

Ultimately, the issue of crime in Collegetown relates to a much broader national problem. According to an article in last month’s Reader’s Digest, “this country's 6,000 colleges and universities report some 40,000 burglaries, 3,700 forcible sex offenses, 7,000 aggravated assaults and 48 murders a year.” Which raises the question: are we safe on college campuses? Sure, far above Cayuga’s waters we are less vulnerable to crime than students at most urban universities, but the belief that our ivy-covered walls are immune to crime needs to be corrected. The false sense of security held by college students nationwide is indicative of a general feeling of invincibility embraced by young adults.

For the most part, colleges have succeeded in creating safe environments for students, but it is impossible to wholly shield students from reality. Perhaps there is a disconnect between what Cornellians think Collegetown is and what it actually is. We are, in fact, residents of the City of Ithaca and must be mindful of the realities of living in a city. Burglaries occur. Robbers exist.

But the most recent shift from burglaries to robberies suggests perpetrators have identified Collegetown as an easy target because of the delayed response in forcible action. It is now increasingly important to ask the question, why hasn't more been done to reduce the number of burglaries and robberies? With yesterday’s University Alert email reporting two additional robberies on and around Stewart Avenue we should seriously evaluate the level of security in Collegetown. If the Ithaca police already identified this time interval as a period of increased risk, one has to wonder why more was not already being done. When a slew of burglaries on a vacant campus escalates into armed robberies, we can be sure that we are now witnessing a serious community threat. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the severity of crimes has increased as a result of criminals being emboldened by ineffective patrolling.

While I am happy that the Ithaca Police Department, Cornell University Police and the Tompkins County Sheriff’s Department have finally presented a united response, they are late. If the clear trend in crime over the past few years had been recognized, the police should have done more to develop powerful methods of crime prevention. I applaud the initial success of the ongoing investigation, but in order to absolve my feeling of vulnerability, I would like some long-term assurance that the police are effectively doing their job.

Laura Temel is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at let9@cornell.edu. Temel is a contributing columnist this semester.