Theft prevention starts with you
By Brooke Boniface
The beginning of this academic year has brought with it three main topics of conversation: loads of school work, thefts, and fines.
With the quarter system, student class work woes are always a hot topic of discussion. But this year, it seems that every time I talk to my peers who lives off campus, they have some story about recent robberies around the University.
Whether it be their house or their friend's house, almost every off campus resident has heard about one of the nine burglaries that have occurred since the beginning of August in the Santa Clara area.
But if they aren't talking about theft, it is more than likely that off-campus residents are discussing whichever recent party was broken up or how their houses were fined.
The Santa Clara police force has been quite zealous this year making sure that parties do not get out of hand.
At the call center alone, three of my coworkers have been robbed during this past month and two of them have had their houses fined for parties.
I can't even count how many times I have come back to my new off-campus place of residence only to find some door or window left wide open or unlocked.
This, under normal circumstances, is disconcerting at best. But given the amount of break-ins in the area, it is down right frightening.
Student apartments and houses make for easy targets for home invasions. And thieves are aware of this fact and fully ready to take advantage of it.
We, as a group, are notoriously lax with security, leaving doors and windows open and failing to take the normal preventative measures that most adults would not think twice about performing.
As a result, most of the robberies have not been caused by forced entry, leaving little evidence for the police to work with.
In addition, the perpetrators take mostly small items like iPods, laptops, digital cameras and credit cards. Most of which are hard to track.
According to Sgt. Ray Carrera of the Santa Clara Police Department, there are simple steps that students can take in order to avoid becoming burglary victims.
Some of these steps include shutting and locking your doors and windows, reminding your house mates to remain vigilant and aware, keeping your small electronics either with you or locked in your own room at all times - rather than out in a common area - and registering your laptops with some sort of GPS.
Macs in particular have a built-in system which, if you register your laptop, will notify you if your laptop is stolen and someone tries to register or use it.
These quick and painless steps can be lifesavers in not only preventing robberies in the first place, but also in helping the Santa Clara Police solve the cases that do unfortunately occur.
In regards to the fines issue, many students have voiced concerns that the police are putting too much energy towards hampering student fun and not enough into dealing with the issue of theft.
According to Sgt. Carrera, however, comparing the two is like "comparing apples and oranges; residential burglaries in a crime sense can't be compared with party responses."
The main goal of the Santa Clara Police department is to keep the students and the public safe at all times.
Whether that be safe from over-consumption of alcohol or safe from home invasion, the police department is giving their best effort to make sure that people are secure.
But we cannot count on the cops for everything.
Their presence does not mean that everything our parents ever taught us about home safety can fly out of our unlocked windows.
Each of us should take some sort of responsibility for our lives.
We must take the aforementioned steps in order to prevent robberies and we must make sure that, even while we have fun, we remain responsible in order to prevent fines.
Then, hopefully, the police can focus on larger crime and the students can focus on what we do best: making Wednesdays just as enjoyable as Fridays and Saturdays.
Brooke Boniface is a junior political science and history double major and editor of the opinion section.