Editorial What's the point of crime alerts?

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Sexual assault is a crime often committed but rarely reported. According to an estimate from the University of Chicago, less than five percent of all sexual assaults are ever reported to authorities. In other words, for every rape case the public hears about, as many as twenty others went unnoticed.

With this national situation in mind, one would think that the College administration would understand and appreciate the necessity of sensitively alerting students when a sexual assault occurs on campus and reminding them of the resources available. But in handling the internal communications regarding the Feb. 17 assault at Brackett House, the administration demonstrated once again that it just does not get it.

Crime alerts, which the College is legally required to distribute, should ideally help investigators solicit information from the community while warning students about the risks of certain behavior or activities. But Public Safety has repeatedly failed to strike this balance. Last week's crime alert called for information on two suspects described only as white males with brown hair, one "more muscular than the other." How much useful information could have been gathered about two brown-haired male suspects at Middlebury is irrelevant, because the alert did not suggest whether the suspects were from Middlebury or even if they were college-aged.

Presumably Public Safety knew more than they shared, and the need to protect victims and suspects confidentiality is legitimate. The bigger absence in the crime alert was the lack of warning to students about how such a crime occurred, how it could be prevented or what students could do if it happened to them or someone they knew. It may have been a student who stopped the assault, but what kind of peers left a friend so intoxicated and alone in the first place? Students do not need details for gossip or muckraking, but they need to appreciate the severity of sexual assault crimes, the ways they can help prevent them and the resources available for victims should they be needed.

President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz's follow-up email did little to redeem his administration. Liebowitz should have expressed his regret and disappointment that such crimes are being committed. He should have offered to open a discussion about the prevention of and responses to these incidents. At the very least, he should have let students know that his staff was more concerned about the implications of this most recent assault than the crime alert suggested. But instead he only defended the inadequate e-mail from Public Safety.

Crime alerts as they are currently employed not only belittle the seriousness of sexual assault, they belittle the Department of Public Safety as an investigative office. Going forward, we hope more attention will be paid to why crime alerts are sent out, and how they can be not just a formality, but a means of prevention.