May 9: U students locking doors, looking over their shoulders

Kimberly Long now locks her dorm door when she walks down the narrow hallway to the bathroom. And when she goes to re-fill her water bottle at the fountain. And when she visits a friend around the corner.

The University of Minnesota freshman wasn't quite so cautious earlier in the school year, but after reports of two rare stranger sexual assaults on and near campus within a week, Long and many other students are taking extra safety measures.

She admits, though, that the extra vigilance may only last through final exams next week. "After a while, it dies down," Long said. "It's not your top concern, so you go back to normal."

It's a pattern college safety officials struggle to combat: Reported incidents spark more care for a while, then students go back to leaving doors unlocked, allowing strangers through secure entrances or dashing back to their residence halls alone at night.

When a crime takes place off campus, many students remain unaware, despite widespread media reports.

"Amid all the other things they have going on in their lives, safety is often just a small piece of their concerns," said University Police Lt. Chuck Miner. "A unique challenge for our community, is that it's ever-changing ... it's basically a completely new community every four years."

Taking heed

Students are paying more attention to who's behind them when they swipe their ID cards and walk in residence hall doors now. But, as Long and others pointed out, many are still holding doors open for people they don't know.

"You feel, like, rude if you don't leave it open," Long said as she walked toward her dorm, which sits a stone's throw from Pioneer Hall, where a freshman reported being sexually assaulted in a bathroom nearly two weeks ago. At the entrance, a student whom Long didn't know, wearing a food-service shirt, stepped aside while holding the security door open so she and others could glide in.

Students have been warned that such gestures could put their fellow residents in danger, and while they are always cautious to a degree, nobody wants to live in fear, she added.

"You don't want to be overly cautious so then you're scaring yourself," she said.

In the Como neighborhood near the university, where a woman reported being sexually assaulted by a stranger Sunday, senior Dana Carlson has been talking about the assaults with friends. The second assault, near the house she rents with four roommates, was particularly scary because it happened in an apartment, she said. "Houses are all pretty easy to break into around here, but the apartments you'd think wouldn't be."

Carlson said she feels safer with several roommates, but they all come and go so much there's "even more of a chance to leave things unguarded," she said.

Stranger rape rare

Most sexual assaults are date rapes or committed by an acquaintance, and reports to police on campus are few: Four were reported so far in 2008. In 2007, there were three.

Reports of sex assaults by strangers are even more rare, authorities and victim advocates say. Police don't keep statistics on acquaintance assaults versus those committed by strangers, but Miner could remember only one other report of a stranger rape in recent years.

Though advocates say sexual assaults are always underreported, the two recent reports are especially troubling because they were unrelated assaults by a stranger and because the suspects haven't been caught, said Jamie Tiedemann, director of the Aurora Center for Advocacy and Education, which focuses on sexual assault.

"It's very difficult to expect students to be ... vigilantes," she said. So campus authorities take big steps to try to keep things safe in other ways.

They try to keep bushes trimmed and walkways well-lit. Emergency phones and alarm buttons dot the campus. There are about 1,000 cameras on the Twin Cities campus, including some "smart" models that home in on suspicious activity. A free escort service is available 24 hours a day and gets about 30 calls a night, authorities said.

The university also sends out crime alert e-mails to all students. Parents can sign up to be notified by e-mail, too. Students can also sign up to receive emergency text messages. The school doesn't typically include incidents off campus, however, even in nearby student neighborhoods.

At campus residence halls, in addition to swiping cards for entry, students are protected by security monitors inside and cameras at main doors. Officials added extra monitors since the reported dorm assault.

Sneaking in behind someone, dubbed "tailgating," is a problem the university has been trying to combat for years, said Jerry Rinehart, vice provost for Student Affairs. Some schools are considering other technology such as turnstiles, Rinehart added.

Still, they can't be sure students will follow rules -- or pay attention at all.

"People want information when they're ready for it. If you send [e-mails] out in a kind of broadcast fashion, oftentimes it just gets deleted," Rinehart said. "Then they express concerns that nobody tells them what's going on."

After the reported assault at Pioneer Hall, students were disturbed at first, said Nellie Marshall, a freshman who was tanning on the lawn outside nearby Centennial Hall this week: "People said, 'Oh my God ... that could have been me.' "

Now, Marshall locks her door when she goes to sleep at night -- something she didn't always do. But she still holds lobby doors open for people she doesn't know.

"I don't want to be rude," she said.

Pam Louwagie • 612-673-7102