App gathers OSU, area cop reports
Lots of students talk about crime, especially sexual assault, on college campuses across the country. They wonder how bad it really is. At Ohio State University, Cailin Pitt did something about it.
Pitt, a fourth-year computerscience major, wrote a program to fetch incident reports from the OSU and Columbus police
websites and send them in an email once a day to subscribers. AwareOSU, as he calls the app, is up to nearly 500 subscribers.
The project, which took about an hour of Pitt’s time to set up initially, was born out of frustration: Ohio State’s public-safety-alert system sends students and employees emails about certain crimes, but only those that happen within the OSU Police Department’s jurisdiction, and only those involving a continuing threat to public safety, such as when a suspect is on the loose.
The most-recent such advisory went out on Sunday, telling students and employees that a woman reported that a “collegeage male” grabbed her and pulled her into a dark area of the residence-hall construction zone near Lane Avenue and N. High Street and sexually assaulted her. The incident happened between 12:30 and 1 a.m. on Sunday.
To learn about crimes that don’t fit those criteria, people have to go to the Ohio State or Columbus police websites and look up reports, unless they subscribe to Pitt’s list.
Pitt, a resident adviser in the Jones Tower residence hall, heard in October from a friend, also a resident adviser, that a student who lives in the friend’s building “had been brutally mugged” on Summit Street, just off campus. People on campus who hear about such crimes are troubled not to know more about them, Pitt said.
“I’m a fourth-year; I’ve been here a long time, and I see it more and more. All of my friends feel the same way.”
The initial idea was to make available the reports from Columbus police patroling areas near campus. Pitt launched the program on Oct. 16. It had 100 users by the second day; as of Oct. 22, it began including incident reports from on-campus police.
During an Oct. 27 security scare, when an anonymous threat against the university prompted a campus-alert email and extra police patrols, Aware- OSU saw the number of users spike to 400. “I didn’t expect it to blow up like that,” Pitt said.
He has tweaked the program in response to users’ suggestions.
“People want to see a map” of crime locations rather than just the address or intersection listed on the reports, he said, so users soon should be able to click through to a website that will show a map for each report.
OSU officials aren’t officially endorsing AwareOSU or taking a position on it, spokesman Dan Hedman said, but he added, “I think we’re in favor of any safety resource.”
Said Hedman, “Not everything can be a public-safety alert. Sometimes the public has to get informed. Luckily enough, our campus is full of smart, bright, intelligent people who can help with that.”