14
NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
LAWRENCE
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 2009
City crime consistent despite reduction in student population
Rvan McGeenev/KANSAN
A woman heads to her car in downtown Lawrence Monday night, passing by a nearly-deserted La Prima Tazza, a coffee shop popular with both students and year-round Lawrence residents. Despite the fluxuation in population as the bulk of students leave Lawrence for the summer, the city's crime rate has historically remained unaffected during June and July.
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Last week, when Christine Nichols got off work, she found her car's windshield smashed. Nichols, a KU almunus, said the incident was a reality check for her.
"It made me feel a little less safe than before, not as naive as before," Nichols said.
Although nothing from her car was stolen, she said she wouldn't be keeping valuables in her car anymore. With much of the student population away for the summer months, crime still remains to be a problem for the city, even though the frequency may have decreased on campus.
Captain Schuyler Bailey with the KU Public Safety Office said the crime rate on campus was affected by the lessened student population.
Bailey said that when 30,000 students moved away, the crime rate dwindled along with the population.
"Everything decreases," Bailey said. "The parking lots aren't filled with cars, the dorms aren't filled with laptops and iPods."
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Amy Stack, Kansas City, Kan., senior, said she thought fewer people
"It almost feels less safe on campus because there's fewer people around." Stack said. "It feels like there would be less people in the case of an incident."
on campus was disquieting.
Bailey said the Public Safety Office made no changes to its operations for the summer because the dorms were filled with summer camps participants.
Sergeant Bill Cory with the Lawrence Police Department said Lawrence was generally a safe community to live in year-round, with students or without.
"We've got a population to protect," Bailey said. "It's just a different population."
Like the Public Safety Office, the Lawrence Police Department makes no changes to its operations during the summer months.
Police Department Web site do not show a disproportionate change in the number of crimes for the summer. The Kansas Incident Based Reporting System Statistics (KIBRS), which counts all the crimes and offenses committed year-round, accounts the summer months of June, July and August for about 25 percent of the total number of crimes.
"One instance in March isn't going to affect the crime rate in June, July or August," Cory said.
"We stay busy year-round," Cory said.
When asked about the relatively recent shooting at the Hawk, Cory said that having a shooting wasn't out of the ordinary for Lawrence anymore.
Crime statistics from the Lawrence
Heidi Raak, owner of The Raven bookstore, said she wasn't worried about crime except for shoplifting, which she said she thought would always happen. She said that she didn't think the student population increased crime and that she felt no more or less safe in the summer.
William Riggs, Lawrence sophomore, had his garage door vandalized last week and had to replace it for $400. He said he didn't feel any more or less safe since the incident, and didn't find the summer any safer than the other seasons. Although the college student population is mostly gone, he said he thought that the poor economy had given local youths fewer job opportunities over the summer and led them to act out with vandalism.
Edited by Derek Zarda
GOVERNMENT Online poker players'money seized by U.S. government
WASHINGTON — An advocacy group for online poker said Tuesday that the federal government has frozen more than $30 million in the accounts of payment processors that handle the winnings of thousands of online poker players.
The Justice Department has long maintained that Internet gambling is illegal, a view that the poker group challenges.
The Poker Players Alliance told The Associated Press that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York instructed three banks to freeze the accounts.
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The prosecutor said that accounts were subject to seizure and forfeiture "because they constitute property involved in money laundering transactions and illegal gambling offenses." The letter was signed by Arlo Devlin-Brown, the assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Associated Press
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