4 - The Michigan Daily - Friday, September 17, 1993
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420 Maynard
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Edited and managed
by students at the
University of Michigan
JOSH DUBOW
Editor in Chief
ANDREW LEVY
Editorial Page Editor
__ _
Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the majority opinion of the Daily editorial board.
All other cartoons, articles and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Daily.
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Insight
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DPS charg~mes batteries,. drains dollars
By MICHAEL T. VAN DRIEL
In his article "Looking back on
'No cops, no code!' (9/14/93), Daily
columnist AmitavaMazumdar
imagined a small, Midwestern town
plagued with the problem of a rising
crime rate. He then imagined a
policy that would curb the trend in
crime without any significant costs.
Un fortunately for Mazumdar, h is
colorful imagination lacks any firm
ground in reality.
In the winter of this year, I
undertook a semester-long study of
the University Department of Public
Safety. Entering the study, I felt
fairly indifferent toward the
expanded role of DPS. By semester's
end, however, my conclusions left
me with a feeling that DPS had
become another bureaucratic money
vacuum sucking away at the
pocketbooks of the students.
The numbers clearly tell the
story. By working closely with Pam
Gonzalez, a secretary in DPS, and
interviewing the director of DPS,
Leo Heatley, I arrived at a set of
numbers that unquestionably reveals
the extraordinary amount of funds
wasted by DPS. Through his sources
at the University Relations office,
Van Driel is an LSA senior and a
first-year student in the Institute for
Public Policy Studies.
MazumdarquotedDPS' current
annual budget as being only
$900,000. According to my sources
in DPS, their annual budget rose
from $500,000 to $1 million in 1992,
and rose again to its present level of
$1.6 million this year.
So what are we, as students,
getting in return for such a huge
allocation of tuition dollars? The
answer is: not much. DPS assumed
full control of campus security
operations beginning in 1992, and
according to the January 1993 DPS
report, there are only four broad
areas of crime (robbery. aggravated
assault, burglary and larceny) where
the number of reported crimes in
1992 drop below the averages from
1988-91. Even in these cases where
there is evidence of a categorical
decrease in crime, the results are not
very significant. In fact, based on
crime valuations derived in a study
conducted by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, the monetary value of
these crime reductions is a mere
S100,000.
The obvious question now
becomes why DPS needs so much
money to prevent such a little
amount of crime? I posed these
questions directlyto DPS during my
research. They had no real reply,
except to say that I may not be
considering the important benefit of
car assistance that the DPS provides
for the campus. I do not find it
comforting to know that the
University pays hundreds of
thousands of tuition dollars to charge
our dead batteries.
In all this talk of financial
numbers, one serious area of campus
safety has gone completely
unmentioned, and that is rape. The
reason is simple, DPS has had little
effect in preventing the four degrees
of rape. Without question, rape is
one of the most serious crimes facing
college campuses, yet the University
continues to throw money at a police
force that can do little to prevent it.
If the University really wants a safe
campus, it should start by working to
stop rape instead of backpack theft.
The best way to accomplish this goal
is to allocate money and manpower
out of the vast DPS budget and into
more constructive programs that
directly attack the problem of rape
on campus.
Now is the time for the
University and its students to force
DPS to be more accountable for its
grossly oversized budget and to find
more appropriate and effective ways
to spend tuition dollars on campus
security. Otherwise, an efficient
campus crime prevention policy will
remain strictly in Mazumdar's make-
believe city.
*I
need a place to store 'U' bedframes
Live on the edge... travel to Florida
By ANDREW LEVY
"Britons incensed over Florida
tourist killing" read the headline in
yesterday's Detroit News.
As many of you may have heard,
there has been a rash of tourist
deaths in the Sunshine State recently,
culminating in two deaths - a
German and a Briton - within one
week. And the world has expressed
its outrage as to the dangers of a
Florida vacation.
Listen to some of the hysteria:
"'Plan your Florida trip like a
commando raid,' advised a headline
in the (London) Daily Telegraph."
The Detroit Free Press gave the
following report: "With noarrests to
announce in Tuesday's slaying of a
British tourist at a remote highway
rest stop near Monticello (Fla.),
authorities summoned dozens of
teens with troubled pasts to the
jailhouse, questioning them in a
process of elimination."
Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles has
been on television, promising
increased police patrols of highway
rest areas and welcome centers.
There is no doubt that these
events are tragic, and that something
has to be done to stop the killing. But
let's be realistic - being a tourist in
Florida is no more dangerous than
being a tourist in any one of a
number of major world destinations.
Let's look at the Middle East.
How dangerous is a Florida
Levy is an LSA senior and is the
Editorial Page Editor ofthe Daily.
vacation when you compare it to,
say, a leisurely weekend on the
beaches of sunny Lebanon? I hear
the weather in Beirut is lovely this
time of year, the airfare is cheap, and
Hertz is offering a discount on
subcompact tanks.
Or why not vacation in Europe?
Scenic Florence, Italy boasts
some of the oldest and most
beautiful works of art in the world.
And if you wait a year to go, the
recently bombed Uffizi Gallery
should be rebuilt by then.
Perhaps you're abusiness
executive and you're planning a trip
to Rio De Janeiro?
Well, before you start hitting the
nightclub scene, make sure that your
company has some extra cash
stashed away to pay your ransom
when you get kidnapped.
Maybe you're looking for
something a little closer to home,
like New York City.
If you can make it there ... you
might not make it out. Even if you
don't get bombed in a skyscraper,
the odds are pretty good you'll get
mugged, ripped off, or something
else.
Do I exaggerate? Yes, but so do
all of those who would have you
believe that a Florida vacation is like
a "commando raid."
It seems every couple of years, a
new destination becomes the "hot"
one to avoid. In the days of the
Achille Lauro hijacking, Italy was
the place to avoid. Americans stayed
away from all of Europe for a couple
of summers in the mid-80s, when
terrorist bombings in Britain and .
Germany were in the news.
And then the focus shifted away,
and people started going there again.
People -especially people
going away on vacation - cannot
live their lives in fear. The odds of
getting killed on a trip to Florida are
no better than the odds of getting
killed elsewhere. Realistically, it
could have been anyone -not just a
tourist. Is it possible that the killers
have a little device in their cars that
flashes "German," "British," or
"American" every time a car goes
by?
Questions of safety exist
wherever you go. Every self-
respecting travel agency equips
travellers - whether they're going
to Florida, the Grand Canyon, Israel,
or Salt Lake City - with tips to
make their trips safer. If there was no
risk, then why would they bother.
That is not to say that some
places aren't worse than others, but
crime against tourists is random
more often than not. You can take
precautions, but there is no way to
completely safeguard yourself. And
the answer is not to exchange a
vacation in sunny Florida for quality
time spent with your television
remote control - or a trip
somewhere "safer."
Inherent in taking any action is
risk. In Florida, you run a much
better chance of catching some rays
than catching a bullet. And those are
odds you can live with.
Purdue paper calls for more diversity
Multiculturalism at Purdue, regard-
less of the University's efforts, is not
where it should be. Purdue needs to
take any action necessary to boost the
ethnic diversity within the faculty.
In the fall of 1991, Purdue ranked
10th in the Big Ten for the total num-
ber of African Americans who are full-
time, tenure-track faculty. Purdue was
11thin thenumberof Hispanics in that
same category.
For a university that claims to be
preparing its graduates to work at the
international level, these rankings are
In an increasingly culturally diverse business world,
how can Purdue graduates be expected to perform
at the same level as graduates of other universities
If they have only seen white males in front of them
during their four or five years of classes here.
broad-based, globally-minded educa-
tion.
In order to receive both an aca-
demically and culturally sound college
education, it seems logical that the
The affirmative action office at
Purdue says the rankings are aresult of
the University being in a small town as
compared to some of the larger towns
in which other Big Ten schools are
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