By: Olivia Crocker and Gurjot Kang
A car prowl epidemic has hit Pacific Lutheran University. With potentially hundreds of dollars in damages, and in some cases stolen property, affecting 23 PLU community members, the issue doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
A smashed driver side window, scratches on the door, chipped car paint and $700 in damages. This is not how first-year Jesse Ring pictured spending her mid-semester break after a stressful week of midterms.
Ring received an email from Campus Safety on Oct. 19 that her car, a 2001 Volkswagen new beetle, had been broken into, prowled, in the Harstad parking lot the night before.
A week earlier, on Wednesday, Oct. 10, Junior student Taylor Greig faced a similar experience after leaving her car parked in the gravel lot behind the Health Center for two hours.
“I was gone for two hours and I walked out to my car and [saw the] window completely busted in, and the glove box was open but they didn’t take anything,” Greig said. “It already sucks having to leave my car on campus at night when I’m going to the library…but now [I’m] scared to leave it on campus during the day.”
While Greig didn’t have anything stolen, Ring had her scientific calculator swiped and was left with the task of cleaning out all the tiny shards of glass from her car.
“I was emotional and I was just trying to get a shop vacuum…and [Campus Safety] couldn’t get me a vacuum to clean out my glass. I wasn’t asking much. I pay like $50 to park there…and I was just like ‘you guys can’t even give me a vacuum or broom?’” Ring said.
PLU Senior Abbey Natucci also fell victim to the car prowls.
Natucci remembers walking up to her car, seeing the broken glass and thinking, “You’re kidding me.”
Natucci thought she was safe. She had left her car parked for only one hour near the Morken parking lot to meet with a professor but when she came back, her backpack along with half of her homework were stolen.
“I was pissed at myself for leaving the stuff in the car, but I guess I just figured it’d be fine for an hour,” Natucci said. “Apparently not.”
According to Campus Safety, the Parkland area has been experiencing an increase in
car prowls and vehicle thefts this semester. Ring, Greig and Natucci are just three of the approximately 23 PLU community members who had their cars prowled this semester around campus between Sept. 1 and Nov. 6. Additionally, there have been two vehicle thefts.
Even if nothing is stolen from the vehicle, students still have to pay the price.
“My friends had the same exact thing happen and are sitting here having to pay a few hundred dollars out of pocket to pay for their windows to get fixed when I’m pretty sure not much was taken from anyone,” Greig said.
To respond to the hike in car prowls this fall, Campus Safety has increased their monitoring of parking lots and the hours of off-duty deputies hired to patrol around campus. Campus Safety is also working to better communicate the issue with the rest of the campus community.
Additionally, Campus Safety was successful in spotting a suspect and identifying the individual with a license plate number and video footage, which was subsequently provided to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. Reports have been filed on the suspect.
But this doesn’t completely resolve the issue since there isn’t just one perpetrator.
“Oh we know it’s multiple people…we’ll get four or five right in a certain time frame and when we have caught some of them on video, we know it’s not the same person,” said Greg Premo, Director of Campus Safety.
In order to catch such crimes, all parking lots on campus have been equipped with some level of camera coverage.
“Not the streets as much, we focus on the parking lots because that’s where the students who pay for their parking decals park. That decal money goes to the parking fund which supports the camera system,” Premo said.
Due to the unreliability of technology sometimes certain cameras aren’t always working.
“Cameras are like any other piece of technology, they go out from time to time…I can’t say that we have 100 percent working at all times but the majority are working,” Premo said
There are total of 77 cameras monitoring areas outside, including some interior cameras and ones on athletic or turf fields. There are approximately three cameras on upper campus and one on lower campus currently not working.
When a camera’s broken, Campus Safety tries to troubleshoot the issue as quickly as possible but sometimes they must hire a third party vendor to bring in a technician to repair the cameras.
“That’s where unfortunately it takes time because we don’t have somebody on campus with that expertise. We have to call in a company and sometimes it takes a couple of weeks, three weeks, a month. It just depends on where we fall on their schedule,” Premo said.
The rate of vehicle-related crimes this fall semester have been up more than normal.
“This has been a really difficult fall forus for sure in comparison to other years,” Premo said.
Some students, like Greig, don’t think the issue lies with PLU or Campus Safety and that they’ve done their best to tackle the issue. However, break-ins are still happening and there is not a set date for when the cameras will be fixed to help catch the perpetrators.
