Gunshots still echo on Hillhouse

It's Mon., Aug. 21, 10:45 p.m., and Luís* is out saying goodbye to a friend who is taking a job out of state. He and two friends stop by Mason Lab to pick up some stuff, and Luís leaves alone. Of course, leaving Mason late is no rare occurrence for science graduate students, who frequently put in long hours at the lab. He crosses Hillhouse Avenue, headed for home. But then he gets this feeling. There's somebody following him. Growing up in Spain, he developed an instinct. "You know when you might be in trouble," he says.

Normally, Luís rides his bike everywhere, so there'd be no cause for concern—he'd just outpedal the suspicious character. But, in one of those strange coincidences, he is walking today, even though he's undergoing physical therapy for a knee injury.

Looking over his shoulder, he sees a guy with a sort of "stealthy attitude." There are a black veil and a baseball cap covering the man's face. And now Luís sees two other men, one on either side, headed towards him. The guy on the right seems normal enough—until Luís looks him in the eyes. Then the guy mumbles and starts to reach for something at his waist.

"I knew I was in serious trouble, and without hesitation I ran," Luís explains. He heads for the alley between Dunham and Kirtland. "I had the feeling that this was the way." He figures he knows the dark alley better than they do.

As he's running, he hears a gunshot, but he just keeps running. He isn't going to turn around. In the dark, he climbs the stairs leading to Prospect Street, but he trips on some of the plants growing next to the path. It doesn't help that—for a reason he can't explain, considering it's a warm August night—he's wearing boots. "At that moment I thought I was dead, 'cause I lost my advantage." But as he recovers his glasses and continues running, he realizes the men are gone. When he reaches the street, he looks back, sees that he's safe, and calls 911 on his cell phone.

ERIN I. LEWIS/YH Efforts to improve safety, such as bus services and emergency phones, are ubiquitous, and their help in reducing crime is undeniable.

There's no traffic on the street on Monday nights in the summer, and he's alone. "You could just scream as loud as you want, and nobody would hear you," he says. But within a minute a police car arrives, and things are under control. Several other police cars arrive, and he rides with them to see if they can locate the suspects within the no-warrant-needed arrest window, but they can't find the men.

The next morning, at physical therapy, Luís reaches down to remove his shoes and notices a bullet in the sole of one of them. "That freaked me out," Luís explains. "I thought the guy fired to intimidate, but apparently he aimed at me."

Yet Luís feels fortunate. "Ten years ago, another student did not have as much luck as I did and was shot dead in front of the church," he says. "A very good friend of mine found him—she thought he was alive, but when she turned him around she found him cold, in a pool of blood."

Sounding the alarm

It was following the spring 1991 murder of Pierson sophomore Christian Prince that Yale implemented many of the security measures now in place: installing blue phones, hiring additional police officers, delegating certain tasks to a separate security force. And it's worked—Yale's aggregate crime count in last year's Uniform Crime Report to the FBI was down 65 percent since 1990 and 14 percent from the year before. Yale Police Chief James Perrotti, sitting behind a desk where a large placard reading "Respect is Mutual" shares the space with a signed Joe Namath Jets helmet, neatly ordered stacks of paper, and a Dell laptop, is understandably proud of his accomplishment. "If you're going to write a negative story, do me a favor and don't come up here," he says brusquely. "You have a University that's done a lot for security and safety. It's a very concerted effort."

ERIN I. LEWIS/YH Asked about the August shooting, just a block from his office in Woodbridge Hall, Levin responds, 'I have not heard about the incident.'

But while this effort is reflected in the unprecedented drop in crime, the August incident and its aftermath raise questions about what additional steps are available. Notification about the incident was limited to faculty and graduates of the engineering departments, and even much of that was informal. Barbara Skolones, an administrative assistant in the chemical engineering department, heard about the event, confirmed it, and took it upon herself to send out a mass e-mail about the incident. "I was just warning everyone [in the department] to be on the alert," she says. At age 56, Skolones says she thinks New Haven's getting safer, but she still urges those new to Yale, especially women, to be careful.

Skolones's efforts, however, had no way of reaching undergraduates, who were never informed about the incident, even though they started arriving on campus just nine days later. Traditionally, students are notified of crime on campus through the police blotter in the Yale Bulletin & Calendar and articles in campus publications. In fact, Perrotti is confident that these two outlets satisfy the federal requirement to "make timely reports to the campus community on crimes considered to be a threat." But the timing of the August incident prevented these channels from spreading the word. In any case, these means would have reached fewer students than, say, a mass e-mail.

University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, says that there is a balance to consider. "We don't want to alarm anybody unduly, but we want information to be available," he says. And how well do the University's methods of disseminating information work? Asked about the August shooting, which occurred about a block from his office in Woodbridge Hall, Levin responds, "I have not heard about the incident."

Deputy Secretary of the University Martha Highsmith defends the University's reluctance to use e-mail. "We don't involve the entire student body, unless, of course, it involves the entire student body." She adds, "Our experience has been that with repeated blanket e-mails, students tend not to read them." Yale reserves e-mails for urgent situations, and Highsmith feels the University's approach of selective notification is "adequate." A mass e-mail was sent out when Davenport senior Suzanne Jovin was murdered in December 1998, but only because there was confusion about the circumstances of the crime, she explains. Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BK '68, GRD '72, on the other hand, justifies the Jovin e-mail because for students it involved "the murder of one of their own number."

Perrotti, when asked about using e-mail to notify students about crimes, pauses to consider the idea but concludes that the option is not open to him. "I don't know if we have the capabilities to be doing that right now," he says. But, in his opinion, the area was no more dangerous following the crime, especially with stepped-up patrols. Lieutenant Michael Patten chimes in that he had tried unsuccessfully to e-mail students about bicycle security. Administrators "are very reluctant to send global e-mails," he says. "They get a lot of complaints about them."

The upshot of all this was that only those connected to the engineering department knew about a subsequent safety meeting. And while Luís says most of the information was common sense, it included some helpful tips, such as to throw your wallet behind you if you're being chased. Perrotti says that people on campus should always take precautions because they're in an urban area, though he does acknowledge that "there's always a time to refresh that message."

Part of Perrotti's hope for getting that message out is a website now in the works. At the University of Pennsylvania, police blotters are available on the web already, in contrast to Yale's Office of Public Affairs, which does not include the blotter in its online Bulletin & Calendar. Asked about this, Assistant Director for Institutional Issues at Public Affairs Thomas Violante had no answer. But he dismissively notes that Yale's crime statistics are available on the Department of Education website (www.ope.ed.gov/security).

Unfortunately, Perrotti says the website's numbers are almost meaningless due to ambiguity in the law, and the reports have come under criticism in the Chronicle of Higher Education. There is confusion about which crimes are considered to be off-campus and about which alcohol incidents should be reported. Larceny, the University's largest crime category, is excluded from the reports entirely. Building for safety Beyond questions of raising awareness lies the issue of security measures themselves. At least some students are making use of the options available to them—2-WALK reportedly handles around 100 calls a night, the campus's 250 blue phones are routinely used to report crimes, Yale buses carry 400,000 passengers a year—and this seems to be at least partially responsible for declining crime. Yet Luís refrains from using services like 2-WALK and the minibus because they are inconvenient, and he's glad he had his cell phone, because he's not sure he would have felt safe stopping to use a blue phone. Meanwhile, Manager of Parking and Transit Joan Carroll, Perrotti, and Highsmith express confidence in the sufficiency of these services and awareness of them among students. Carroll acknowledges she has little hard data about those who ride her buses and that they're overdue for a student survey, but there's one thing she's sure of: "I have a budget, and I'm always over it."

As for physical security, the installation of increased lighting on Hillhouse Avenue and tightening of ID card access on the engineering buildings following the August incident implicitly acknowledges that there is always room for improvement. Engineering Director of Graduate Studies Sandro Gomez, who helped bring about these changes, feels that the crime helped rush improvements that might otherwise have taken a long time.

But, despite annual reviews of security on campus, future plans for expanding security infrastructure remain limited. Somewhere in the future lies a new police headquarters that will include community space for meeting with the public. But at present the only major project is revamping the campus's approach to lighting.

The 180-page Framework for Campus Planning complains that landscapers have been "concerned primarily about addressing personal safety, not in highlighting Yale's distinctive architecture." It argues that the proposed lighting provides the best of both worlds. "Increase the sense of security by ensuring visibility—but through a combination of lighting strategies, not necessarily by increasing overall lighting levels," it says. The "sense" of security?

Yet Perrotti says the lighting changes sound sensible, and Patten notes that the sense of safety may bring more people out, thereby increasing actual safety. Highsmith promotes recent tests along York Street as "really terrific."

Perrotti, who has the Framework sitting right on his desk, also is conciliatory about its virtual omission of safety concerns and focus on aesthetics and walkability. He says that security "has been built into almost everything that's been done around here" in the last 10 years, with police officers even sitting in on planning meetings.

The Framework discusses only a handful of other security issues. For one thing, the report says bike racks are inadequate and the roads unfriendly to bicycles. While Luís says his bicycle is a guarantor of security, Perrotti and Patten doubt that bicycle-friendliness is a security concern. In fact, they say bigger bike racks provide bike thieves with one-stop shopping. The report also notes that "multiple small [parking] lots complicate assignment, maintenance, security, and control." Carroll says they're working on consolidating parking lots, but that this will be several years in the making. Finally, the Framework suggests opening residential college gates facing High, York, and College Streets to make the campus more walker-friendly. Perrotti claims to know little about the issue and thinks college Masters will end up having a lot of say.

The only safety improvement Luís can imagine is increased security camera use. But Perrotti says cameras are a double-edged sword, since they often build a false sense of security. The quality of monitoring and the video itself are both limited. And Highsmith notes that cameras, themselves largely more for investigation than for prevention ("they may not keep someone from a dastardly deed"), are already in some of the more remote and isolated places. As far as she's concerned, the number of cops on the street adequately deals with the situation.

Avoiding complacency

In the end, the most significant factor may be the officers themselves. The inverse correlation between crime and police personnel is clear. "There's no question about it," Perrotti says. The force of 79 officers, up from 55 at the time of the Prince murder, does a good job of covering manpower-intensive community policing beats. Perrotti also touts the merits of the people who work for him. "People want to work here," he says. "The quality of police officer here is pretty amazing." In particular, he's proud of the minority officers who "have really stepped up to the plate" and those working on his "crime analysis function." By analyzing crime data, the department was able to stop a wave of laptop theft, reduce bike thefts, and limit thefts in the library and the gym.

Even with these recent successes, the latest numbers, the thriving police force, and the lower crime in New Haven generally, the University and the police know they can't rest on their laurels. "If you have the kind of period that we've had recently where crime is very low, we think that's positive," Highsmith says. But she added, "I'm always encouraging students to not take that for granted."

The shooting in August was an important, if under-publicized, reminder about the need to keep an eye on safety, especially since Luís's attackers are likely to remain at large. Fear of his assailant even keeps him from using his real name, since "he knows and I know that I can identify him." But, in the end, Luís is resigned to the way things are. "What can you do? If someone wants to commit a crime, they will," he says. "But it's not something that happens every day." * Name has been changed.

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