With some students alarmed by robberies reported on and near Milwaukee college campuses this summer, Marquette and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have taken two different approaches to communicating with students about crime.
Steve Garrison, a student at UWM and the news editor at the UWM Post, said the university’s methods of communicating crimes to students could be improved.
Garrison said students are able to view off-campus police reports on incidents like muggings in a small booklet located in the UWM police station.
“(The booklet) is obviously not the best method,” he said.
Garrison said notices of major crimes near campus are sometimes reported to students through email, but other information is often more difficult to come by.
According to an article published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in February 2010, the student newspaper and one of its editors filed a lawsuit against the university for refusing to cooperate with open records law.
The school had withheld information about Union Policy Board meetings, which allocate space to student organizations, in order to protect the identities of students who were voting members of the board.
The UWM Post won the case and obtained the documents it had requested.
The University is fairly transparent with crime, Garrison said. But UWM Police Department Chief Michael Marzion said he often refers people with questions about crime to the Milwaukee Police Department website for information.
“That’s all MPD District 1,” he said. “We have a really safe campus. Once you step into the neighborhoods, though, then you’re in Milwaukee.”
MPD encourages people to file open records requests to obtain detailed crime information, which can cost money and take up to 10 days to process.
Marquette’s Department of Public Safety operates differently, said DPS Captain Russell Shaw.
“We try to be as transparent as possible with students about what is going on around campus,” Shaw said.
The DPS station on campus puts out a morning report, much like UWM’s booklet log, but also posts the information online. Email notifications are sent to students for every violent crime report filed on campus and in the surrounding neighborhoods — where nearly all muggings committed against students occur, according the university’s annual Campus Crime Statistics report.
As the Marquette Tribune reported in an article published on Aug. 29, though, DPS operates as a private security company owned by Marquette. This means it has different rules and regulations than the UWM police department, which is a sworn police force part of MPD.
