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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 8, 1997)
CONTACTING US NEWSROOM: ADDRESS: (541)346-5511 Oregon Daily Emerald E-MAIL: PO. BOX3159 ode<0oregon. uoregon.edu Eugene, Oregon 97403 ONLINE EDITION: darkwing uoregon.edu/~ode Perspectives EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Sarah Kickler EDITORIAL EDITOR Mike Schmierbach NIGHT EDITORS Evan A. Denbaum Nicole Krueger Police too slow in responding to 911 call It took about 20 minutes for police to arrive at an apartment where a burglary was under way W hile most members of the community prefer to see the West Univer sity area as a pleasant off-campus place for students to live, recent incidents make it almost im possible to ignore the reality that the area is not only growing more dan gerous, but the protection it receives from law enforcement is not ade quate. If the drive-by shooting at E. 13th Avenue and Ferry Street early this September and the riot that occurred on E. 17th Avenue last weekend do not demonstrate this to city officials, I’m afraid nothing will. In a recent meet Nicole Kristal ing with City Coun cil member Bobby Lee, I discovered the West University neighborhood has Deen a main source ol criminal activi ty for some time. Lee himself has been the victim of burglaries and stalking. College students and their safety must not be a high enough priority to merit additional police protection, and I say this because I experienced this neglect firsthand a few weeks ago. At 2:45 a.m. on Sept. 28,1 left my apartment to drive a friend home. I returned home five minutes later. As I exited my car, one of my neighbors approached me. “Do you live in that apartment up there?” 1 nodded. “Well, two guys just crawled into your kitchen window. We’re on the phone with 911 right now. You can come on back to our apartment until the cops get here.” In their living room, another one of my neighbors was talking on the phone to a 911 dispatcher. She told the dispatcher I was there, and the dispatcher asked to talk to me. As the woman asked me to repeat my address and phone number three times, I grew progressively more frus trated. I told her that if an officer did not come right away, my possessions would be stolen.The dispatcher told me that her main concern was the safety of my roommate who might be inside. Yet police failed to arrive at the scene until 20 minutes later. If my vr*E% Q/ % 4*, 1 o GO roommate had been home, she proba bly would have been victimized long before they arrived. At that moment, one of the neigh bors who was looking out the blinds shouted, “They just took off up the al ley on a couple of bikes.” “Did they have bikes before?” I asked. “No,” she replied. I was furious. I dropped the phone and ran into my apartment. My bike and my roommate’s bike were gone. 1 ran upstairs. My guitar and my $1,500 four-track recorder had been stolen as well. My two neighbors came to the apartment. I told them not to touch anything. We went downstairs and waited on my porch for the police to arrive. At that moment, the two burglars walked down the alleyway. They were carrying beer bottles. “Is that them?” I whispered. "Yes, let’s get inside.” The two burglars had the nerve to say hello. We locked the door and ran upstairs. I called 911. I screamed at the dispatcher, telling her that the burglars were in my front yard and that officers still had not ar rived. She asked me in which direc tion they were headed. I angrily re minded her that I was inside the house, protecting myself from assault and for that reason, I was not standing outside and watching them. My neighbors and I went down stairs, and, after another three to five minutes, two officers arrived. One left to do an area search. But it was too little, too late. The other officer went into my apartment, and I told her which items had been touched and moved. She removed a partial print from the window pane. She took our state ments, commented on what a busy night it had been and left. By that time, it was 4 a.m. I stayed awake wondering how the city can afford to spend $30 million for repairs on the Ferry Street Bridge Corridor, and yet it cannot spare a few bucks to hire a few extra cops to cover a high-crime area on a Saturday night. The only conclusion I could reach was that students are still not being taken seriously in this community because of their age. But how can their contribution of more than $150 million into the local economy not be taken seriously? Every time I’ve called the station with a noise complaint about my neighbors, police have responded within five minutes; yet, the one time I called to report a more serious crime in my residence, they responded in 20 minutes. Eugene police officers not only need the means (more officers on the streets) to respond to crime in the West University neighborhood on the weekends, but they also need to pri oritize the emergencies over the noise complaints and adjust their re sponse time accordingly. I lost property valued at more than $2,000 because of the city’s reluc tance to prioritize my age group. I fol lowed all the rules. I followed all the protocol. I called for assistance. But assistance was too late. Nicole Kristal is a columnist for the Emerald. Her columns appear on alter nate Wednesdays. Her views do not nec essarily represent those of the Emerald. Quoted “Herlectures have inspired count less audiences across the country and around the world. Her achieve ments over the years have given black women a role model from which to draw confidence and pride in a time when such a figure was so earnestly needed." RyanMaughn, writing in Friday’s Emerald about Maya Angeiou’s perfor mance at the Huit Center. ‘This was a taste ofAngelouather best—a riveting, funny and gloriously down-to-earth speaker with a gift for putting people at ease, urging them to laugh at themselves and showing them how it’s done. A gift ed writer and con summate per former, Angelou plies her crafts well —delighting in the lyrical power of lan guage, sharing her joy." Kimber Williams, reviewing Angelou's performance in Tuesday’s Register Guard. “At the inaugural, Bill Clinton, whose signature on welfare ‘reform'would fol low three years later, used Maya Angetou, a very weak poet, as anew.mediagenic form of lawn jockey, and no one in the new black-culture orthodox, as far as I know, has uttered a word of criticism about her willing ness to play the , ‘Out List’ voluntary The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Al liance (LGBTA) would like to clarify a statement made in Tuesday's Coming Out Week article [ODE, Oct. 7). Because the LGBTA is concerned about protecting the safety and privacy of its members, it is necessary to correct any misconceptions created by the definition Doug Irving used to describe what we call the Out List. The LGBTA does not “main tain an ‘Out List’ — a full page of names of students who have formally come out,” as was stated in the article. The Out List is instead a full page ad the LGBT Educational and Support Services Program pro duces in cooperation with the LGBTA as part of National Coming Out Week. The point of this list is to acknowledge the importance of being visible and to break stereotypes. The list does not list every out LGBT person on campus that we know of, but only those who have given their explicit consent to be on this list. Any one interested in being on the Out List picks up LETTERS TB THE EDITOR and fills out an Out List form. After these forms are handed in, we carefully double check and verify the identities of the people on the forms and that they want to be on the Out List as either an ally or an LGBT individual. We publish the Out List once a year around Na tional Coming Out Day, and we do not maintain it throughout the rest of the year as the article sug gests. Nor do we use this list for any other purposes than for this one Coming Out Week ad. This year’s list will be in this Friday’s Emerald. If you have any questions about the Out List and the careful process we use to create it, we encourage you to contact the LGBTA at 346-3360. Karen Vittek LGBTA co-director Add-drop compromise Ah, yes, University politics has once again es poused the old adage: Why compromise when you can have it entirely your way? Sorry, folks, this won’t work for class registration procedures any better than it has in the past. When Bill Miner says that students need more time to get a sense for a class, he is entirely correct. However, he appears to have overlooked the rea sons that the deadlines were changed in the first place students who wanted to be in some class es found themselves locked out until the third week because students who were “uncertain” did n’t drop until the last minute. Why not recognize that one week may be plenty of time in some situations and dreadfully inade quate in others? An alternative to the extremes — one vs. three weeks to drop — could go like this: When a class is 85 percent full, students should have to make their decisions quickly, on the grounds that certain more eager students may be locked out. Otherwise, let students have more time to decide. Miner seems to have forgotten that when you push the pendulum too far in one direction, it will eventually and inevitably — swing back toward you. Let’s try compromise, eh? Sean Williams _____ Music education Vince Passaro, writing about African American lit erature in the July, 1997, Harper’s. CORRECTION The LGBTA should have been identified as the Lesbian, Gay, Bi sexual, Transgen der Alliance in the article, "‘Coming Out Week’ encour ages support of gay community” on Oct. 7. The Emerald regrets the error.
