To: Teresa Sullivan, University President, Allen Groves, Associate Vice President and University Dean of Students, Michael Gibson, Chief of University Police, Pamela Sutton-Wallace, UVa Medical Center CEO, and Timothy Longo, Sr., Chief, Char...

Make UVa Grounds Safe Again

In light of Ms. Graham's and Ms. Harrington's tragic disappearances from or adjacent to university property and the multitude of sexual assaults in the same areas over the past 5 years, UVa administration and police need to step up patrolling and student alerts to make grounds a safe place again. Students, professors, university staff, hospital employees and all other members of the university community deserve to live and work in a community where sexual predators and violent criminals do not feel comfortable hunting for victims on or nearby university property, which based on recent criminal activity, they very much do.

Why is this important?

Update 9/24/14: I am talking with Dean Groves tomorrow regarding this petition. Thank you all for your support and please continue to bring suggestions as to how we can improve UVa Grounds' safety for everyone.
For years, UVa has tried to pretend violent and sexual crimes do not occur on a regular basis on or nearby university property, but with each sexual assault and abduction, the evidence is mounting that the university not only has a problem, but is not effectively fighting the problem. Simple changes in how the UVa and Charlottesville PD patrol areas like Wertland, 14th, 15th, Virginia, Gordon, Grady and JPA, which have been hot spots for violent and sexual crimes since 2006, when I first started attending UVa, could prevent future tragedies like the ones that occurred this past weekend.
Michael Gibson, Chief of UVa PD, said in an email last year, "While you can never completely protect yourself from sexual assault, there are some things that you can do to help reduce your risk of being assaulted." He is absolutely right--one thing we can do is hold him and his police department accountable for failing to prioritize patrolling areas that, year after year, continue to feature sexual assaults, abductions, assaults, muggings, etc. Additionally, his department's alerts are also inadequate and misleading. They often wait days before deciding there has been enough or severe enough criminal activity in an area to issue warnings, by which point, other students have needlessly fallen victim to the same criminals because they do not know there is a problem. While previous email alerts used to detail the exact addresses that criminal activity had taken place, the emails from this past weekend have omitted location details in some pathetic attempt to pretend there isn't crime on UVa property. The withholding of this information serves UVa's image at the expense of student safety. These alerts also fail to identify important details like how the criminals were thought to be targeting students, while also placing undue blame on the students for the crimes committed against them by implying or omitting details that make every scenario seem like the student is wandering lost and drunk out of their mind, like they have unfairly done with Ms. Graham.
Furthermore, Dean Laushway, one of the associate deans of students at UVa, upon hearing my suggestion at a lunch meeting three years ago to start a crime awareness website specifically for the UVa area, implied that maintaining the pristine image of UVa and Charlottesville was more important than taking steps to make the community a safer place for students. Now that a sexual assault has occurred on the front door of UVa's hospital on Lee Street this past weekend (per the CrimeView map on Charlottesville PD's website), in addition to Ms. Graham's abduction, the crime problem is now affecting hospital employees, patients and their visitors. This is simply unacceptable and we, the UVa community, deserve a safer place to learn, work and play than what the UVa administration and police department is currently providing. They owe it to everyone, and especially the women of the UVa community, that UVa Grounds and the surroundings areas should not be hunting grounds for sexual deviants and heinous murderers.
Addendum 9/18:
1) For future signers, please state in the "comments" section if you are a student, alumnus/a or concerned community member (which could mean in Charlottesville/Albemarle County or otherwise). If you are a student or alum, please state your school ie CLAS, etc and your graduating year. If you are a concerned community member, you are welcome to state if you are part of a university community elsewhere or have another background that you feel is relevant to this issue. We would like to know this information as best we can so that when we present this petition to UVa, they have an idea of where the backing for this petition comes from. This is not to discount any of those three populations and frankly, the fact that citizens from over half the US states and at least 5 foreign countries have signed the petition is amazing and speaks to the fact that students, faculty, citizens, patients and visitors having the right to a safe university community is a universally desirable goal that is recognized from people from all kinds of backgrounds and locations. Thank you all for voicing your concerns.
2) If you have suggestions or anecdotes of how other university campuses do security and alerts well, please mention them in the comments section. Crowd-sourcing is a great way to get ideas and no one person can have all the answers.