ODU students express fear, call for help after violence

NORFOLK

More lighting along 41st, 42nd and other streets near Old Dominion University. More emergency call boxes. And a shuttle service that goes into the neighborhoods and has later hours on the weekends.

Students offered these suggestions and talked about their fears at a student-led rally at ODU on Wednesday, held to address a recent rash of violent crimes in the neighborhoods surrounding the school.

"I'm afraid to take night classes," Joel Ludwig said.

About 100 students, parents, administrators and police officials attended the forum at Webb University Center.

Organizers purposely called it a "rally" to get their peers hyped about the issue of safety, said Clif Gustafson, a 22-year-old finance major. The university has held town hall meetings to hear concerns, but Gustafson said many students have seen those as "political empty words."

Two weeks ago, a man was shot and killed less than a block from university housing, and in weeks prior, students had been robbed at gunpoint.

Gustafson, who was robbed last summer while sitting on his porch on West 41st Street, started a page on the online networking site, Facebook, called "ODU Is Not Safe!!!!!!!!" the day after the killing; it happened near his home.

Another student launched a separate Facebook page, "Students For Concealed Carry on the ODU campus," to gauge interest in approaching the university about lifting its ban on carrying guns and other weapons on campus.

Jennifer Mullen, a university spokeswoman, said ODU has no plans to reconsider its weapons policy.

Mullen said the school has seen an increase this year in robberies and assaults off campus, where more students are living with the shortage of on-campus housing. But robberies and assaults on campus have declined, she said.

Officer Chris Amos, a Norfolk police spokesman, said Wednesday night that robberies are up, but he could not verify whether the number of assaults has increased.

University and city police have said they will step up car and bicycle patrols of the area. A task force is being formed to look at safety and neighborhood issues, such as housing code enforcement.

Some suggestions, such as call boxes and more lighting in the neighborhoods, are out of the university's hands because those are city streets, Mullen said. She said ODU is already looking at expanding the shuttle service.

ODU Police Chief Rudolph Burwell said this week that the idea of Norfolk moving its Third Precinct station - at Goff Street and Tidewater Drive - to or near the campus "has been tossed around." But he emphasized that it wasn't a new idea, and that there have been no decisions or planning.

"There has been nothing concrete," Burwell said.

Gustafson said he'd like to see the university adopt some of the strategies being used by Virginia Commonwealth University, the state's largest school, which is in the center of Richmond.

There, the university police department relies on community policing and other approaches, including crime prevention seminars, landscaping to deter crime, and rape aggression defense courses. During the past 20 years, enrollment has nearly doubled but reported crimes have dropped, according to the VCU police department.

At the ODU rally, students said the university needed a better alert system.

One student said she was bothered that while she didn't get an alert about the shooting on 41st Street, she gets constant alerts when the weather is bad.

Another said the college should consider a "drunk bus" to carry students home from neighborhood parties. Several said they don't see enough police patrols on side streets, only on major corridors. One student praised campus police, saying that whenever she has called them for a ride home, they've helped.

Naomi Ramos Abreu, from Woodbridge, lives in freshman housing on 41st Street and said she doesn't feel safe anymore. She said the university should curtail enrollment if it can't give students more secure places to live.

"If you're going to accept that many students," she said, "you need to provide them security."

 Pilot writer Matthew Bowers contributed to this report.

Denise Watson Batts, (757)446-2504, denise.batts@pilotonline.com