By Anonymous
I never thought there was not enough security on campus but then it slowly became clear to me that I did not feel completely safe. When you open the door and someone’s waiting to get let in or is right behind you, you are obviously not going to close the door in their face because that would be rude. When does it become unsafe to be letting people into the building?
I first started being a bit weary of the security when my dad was let into the building. I was taking a nap and ended up sleeping through my alarm for an appointment I had. So he gets let into the building and comes to knock on my door to wake me.
He says to me, “Why do people let some strange middle aged man into the building? I obviously do not live in a college dorm. That cannot be safe.” I understood where he was coming from but I was not necessarily alarmed.
About two weeks ago, I was coming home from downtown around midnight or 1 a.m. and my friend and I were some of the only few people on the shuttle. Other than us, there were three boys and one of them was really drunk and did not seem to understand personal space. He kept trying to touch my leg and talk to me and I was not okay with that. I stood up on the bus and jumped over the seats to get away from him and he seemed to get the message after that.
Once we got off the bus we ran to our building to avoid him talking to us again. We got in, closed the door, made sure we heard it lock, and went up the elevator and ran to my room. I do not know how he knew we went to my building or how he knew what floor we were on but somehow he got into the building and found us on the third floor.
He started opening random doors in our hallway and looking for us. He did not knock, he just kept attempting to open them and if they were locked he continued to another door. He got to my suitemate’s door and opened it and I heard a commotion so I ran into her room and saw him trying to make out with her. Since she was not interested in kissing him, her mouth was closed, so he just proceeded to lick her face.
She was shaking her head no, pushing him off, and he told her “No, no, it’s sweet!” When I got in there I pulled him off of her and tried to get him out of our room but he tried to tell me kissing her against her will was sweet and went to go back to it. At that point I was much more angry than before so I pushed him out the door and locked it and told him to get out of the building a few hundred times.
I checked out the peephole and saw him standing there trying to open more doors so I went to my room to find my mace and lock my bedroom door before he could wake up my roommate. As soon as I got to the door he was already trying to open it so I screamed no and slammed it in his face.
I stood staring out the peephole for a good minute or two to make sure he was leaving and he was not. Much to my dismay, my mace was missing. I opened the door, walked outside and told him to leave before I called the police. He proceeded to tell me he was just looking for his friend and I said “Your friend doesn’t live here, he isn’t in this building. Leave or I’m calling the police right now.” He decided it might be a good idea to leave so he walked into the common room.
I had a strange feeling he was not actually leaving. I walked into the common room and looked through the window to the other hallway and he, of course, was in there trying to open their doors as well. I found him and was shouting that he had to leave and he ended up doing so.
The next day when I was talking to people about it, he apparently went down the hall, asked to use someone’s bathroom, and left their room then tried to open more people’s doors.
My friends in the room next to me when they heard the story were laughing so hard because they heard someone say they were calling the police in the hallway and assumed I was drunk. They heard someone try to open their door as well as everyone else in the hallway.
Because of all of these security problems I have noticed, I started thinking about what we could do to change this. I know myself and my friends a lot of the time are too lazy to bring our keys with us so we occasionally leave the doors unlocked. I feel it may be a better system to have keypads for the doors to unlock because then you will not lose your passcode and the door will never be unlocked. This also helps if someone is in the building who is not necessarily someone who should be, like my father, because then they can come in and wake me up by knocking but they cannot get into my room.
Of course my father was not going to break into my room but if there was a bad person in the building they might just be trying to get into anyone’s rooms they can like the face-licker in my story above.
If that seems impossible to some people, another idea was to have signing people in be a bit stricter. I know this sounds horrible to most people because they are tired enough as it is trying to sign people in with all the limitations but maybe everyone who walks in should have to show photo ID like my dad.
One day I let in a man about 50 or 60 years old and there was an RA there signing people in but they did not ask this man who he was here for or tell him to wait in the common room so I was a bit concerned with that as well. It just seems to me that the system is a bit flawed and I would feel safer if there were more precautions.
