Curbing crime around ODU

The intersection of a university and a town is seldom a stable place. Old Dominion University's encroachment into nearby neighborhoods is no different.

In fact, because of the university's relatively rapid growth in student population and in physical size, many neighbors would argue that the areas around ODU have been more unstable than most.

Sadly, that tension between the college and its neighbors has a human face. Christopher Cummings, an ODU junior, was shot to death in his 42nd Street house at 5 a.m. on June 10. The circumstances surrounding Cummings' death haven't been released; we do know that it wasn't the first break-in this year at his rental house, and it's hardly the only crime in his neighborhood.

Putting such incidents into perspective is difficult. A report by The Pilot's Patrick Wilson and Sarah Hutchins shows that the number of crimes around ODU has fluctuated: 28 through mid-June in 2011, compared with 33 in all of 2010, 45 in 2009 and 55 the year before that.

ODU officials rightly point out that once students leave campus for their homes in Lambert's Point, Highland Park and Larchmont, they pass largely into the care of the Norfolk Police Department.

It doesn't help that some students also create their own problems. Public drunkenness - and everything that goes with it - is a regular feature after dark. And other transgressions aren't confined to locals. As Wilson and Hutchins pointed out in their story Sunday, Norfolk officers have arrested students who've received large packages of pot. Undergraduates have been implicated in more violent crimes, including robbery of a classmate.

ODU police officers can help patrol off-campus areas, but there are simply not enough officers to prevent every crime.

Still, there should be a more vigorous police presence. Everyone agrees on that. Periodic episodes have added urgency to the push for a precinct on or near campus. But it has been harder to sustain that initiative in the face of money woes and other pressures.

As ODU President John Broderick mentioned in a letter last week, Norfolk will spend $300,000 on planning a new police substation, and the university has asked the state to spend nearly $8 million on the project.

That project needs to move forward much more quickly.

A police precinct alone can't end crime around ODU. But it will help, as will several new officers, video surveillance on campus, new lighting and an improved emergency callbox system. So will improving transportation options and educating students, many of whom have never lived in a city.

ODU and Norfolk have an obligation to each other and to students and residents to more vigorously enforce the law, to work together and do what they can to make campus and its environs safe. Crime is a sad but unavoidable fact of life in a city. But it shouldn't define this historic port city or the campus growing within.