Alert ugrads! Or not.

It’s beginning to feel routine. You open your e-mail account and someone named Ugrad Update has sent you a security notification. With a sort of detached sense of duty you open the familiar package, perhaps registering whether the alleged perpetrator(s) were 15 or 20, and which corner of campus they claimed. These tales of armed and unarmed, daylight and midnight confrontations have been especially abundant this semester (and this past summer), and have been met with little fanfare by the campus community at large. There have been no town halls to discuss them, and as far as we can tell campus culture hasn’t been infused with high tensions come nightfall. This isn’t a bad response per se, as we have been spared the inevitable head-banging which accompanies talk of Columbia’s relationship with the larger neighborhood. But the frequency of these episodes is on the rise and merits some discussion. What exactly are we confronting in our inboxes and in our neighborhood?

It would be far too easy to cast the various players in fundamentally opposing roles. On one stage you have the innocent college student, wearing her “Columbia”-emblazoned sweatshirt as she trudges home from the Teachers College library at 1 a.m., meeting a “m/b/18-20 yrs/5?10?-6?/thin build/red T-shirt, red baseball cap, light-colored shorts” who demands her iPhone. On the other stage the roles are reversed, as the desperate local teenager is driven to punch and steal from Columbia students, whose university is threatening the neighborhood and whose parents will surely replace the iPhones. These dramas are useless, and yet they are among the most common responses to the type of violence we have been witnessing. Some find racial profiling an irresistible trap given the common descriptions of black and Hispanic alleged perps, and some find it inconceivable that some teenage boys just do stupid things without direct correlation to their economic oppression.

In truth, there is blame to share. Columbia’s encroachment into West Harlem has obvious social and economic repercussions on that neighborhood, but we don’t know where these particular alleged criminals are from, nor do we think that iThievery is the answer. Very likely our campus is just full of low-hanging fruit. After hearing so many stories, one wonders if the recession might be partially to blame. And yet, we are reluctant to attribute everything to larger social causes. We elide both the experience of the victim and the agency of the perpetrator when we rely too heavily on structural explanations. Poverty and opportunity must be contributing factors, but to what degree we can’t be sure. After all, we receive only a partial picture.

Public Safety only reports when a Columbia “affiliate” is involved, but it seems likely that non-affiliates who live in the neighborhood have also seen a rise in young men demanding their stuff. Perhaps our own vacillation about how to interpret these events shows how ignorant we are of our own surroundings, further proving that Columbia is an island unto itself. We don’t have clear local allies with whom a fruitful solution-seeking session could be had. And if Public Safety is interested in enlisting Columbia students in identifying local threats, you’d think it would make sense to inform us based on geography, not school affiliation. It might be interesting to learn about the rationale behind the current system. Is it simply a case of logistics and information sharing with the NYPD? Is it a symptom of Columbia’s isolated dominance in the area—our swipe-accessible real estate guarded by our private police force, focused exclusively on the safety of Columbians? We assume that because only “Columbia affiliates” are under Public Safety’s jurisdiction, it is limited in what it can report, but perhaps there are other ways to perceive the current rise in thefts more holistically. Maybe that would help us think about how we as students can be more conscious (Shock and Awe would suggest NOT walking around on your iPhone in the park at night) without retreating into the Columbia fortress mentality that has long formed a barrier to communication with all of Columbia’s neighbors.

Sarah Leonard is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. Kate Redburn is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and African studies. Shock and Awe runs alternate Fridays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com