The crime on campus has gotten nonsensical. The University of Missouri-St. Louis is gaining a horrible reputation for its lack of safety and it seems as if little to nothing is being done to prevent these crimes from happening.Every time a student logs into their university email account there seems to be a clery release for some assault, misconduct, theft or robbery and the latest crime addition—abduction.

The campus police, along with Normandy and Bel-Nor police need to be doing more. They most certainly do a good job at patrolling. It is impossible to drive through the outskirts of campus without seeing a Normandy or Bel-Nor police car parked and lurking. With all of their patrolling one would think that it is the safest municipality in St. Louis County, but what Normandy police is good for is writing traffic tickets. While Johnny Law is writing four-miles-over-the-speed-limit tickets to secure money for Normandy, someone is getting sexually assaulted in a nearby bush.

In fairness, the police simply cannot be every place crime is happening whenever it is happening, but there is safety in numbers. If there were 30 police cars driving around campus regularly there would still be constant crime. Police officers cannot see what is going on if they are behind a wheel. They need to be out of their cars providing a direct, intimidating presence on campus. Criminals would less likely to commit crimes if they knew an officer was walking around the MSC that could easily catch them versus having a officer just drive by.

Along with a stronger presence, there also needs to be more light around campus at night. Although it seems annoying, the lanyard program the School of Social Work is proposing may be a good idea for all campus students. If every student is required to wear ID badges, then students could spot potential predators easily.

UM-St. Louis has had retention problems for a while now. The fact that safety on campus is becoming a huge problem is not making the university look desirable to students. There is absolutely no reason why anyone should feel unsafe at a learning institution. The Student Government Association did a good job last year organizing the Campus Safety Walk and getting the results to the appropriate university parties, but that is just step number one. The perpetual crime on campus should urge them to do something with those results sooner. How many assault victims will the university have before they start counting bodies?

Sequita Bean is Editor-in-Chief of The Current.