Pipe Dream has recently published editorials and articles about off-campus incidents involving assaults on Binghamton University students. The editorials questioned why the University did not provide alerts or notifications to the student body about these incidents and our commitment to transparency about off-campus safety. As the chief student affairs officer and chief law enforcement officer at the University, we met with the Pipe Dream editorial board last week to directly address the questions they had raised.

The University has control over and responsibility for the on-campus environment. When something occurs on campus that creates a safety risk, we have a high level of confidence that we can communicate accurate, timely information that will inform and assist the campus community and we regularly provide alerts. The University does not have control over the off-campus environment, responsibility for it or access to information necessary to provide authoritative, timely alerts. The University does not receive direct notice of police or safety matters involving Binghamton students in the City of Binghamton or other off-campus communities where students live or visit. When the University does learn of such incidents, it is almost always after-the-fact, through third parties or because the responding law enforcement agency requires some information from the University to assist with any investigation. We first learned of the Hawley Street incident late Sunday morning through third-party reports. We did not fail to notify the community of the incident to hide anything, but because by the time we had confidence in the information, everything we knew about the incident had already been publicly reported. The University does not ever receive notice of safety matters in the surrounding community involving non-students, except through news reports like everyone else. In fairness to city officials, they do not always know that specific victims of crimes are University students.

That the University has only sporadic and incomplete information about criminal conduct in surrounding jurisdictions has implications for what notice we can confidently provide. If the University becomes aware of an incident involving students at a particular location and alerts students to avoid that location, we run the risk of inadvertently directing them toward another location that may involve a greater risk to safety based upon circumstances of which we are not even aware.

Contrary to the implication of the recent Pipe Dream editorials, Binghamton University is fully supportive of student interest in access to information about off-campus safety. The University Office of Off Campus Programs provides a prominent link to the most recent crime maps available from the City of Binghamton on its website. The University even provided technical expertise to initially create the map. Contrary to one of the quoted sources in a recent Pipe Dream article, the University does provide information about off-campus safety through New Student Orientation. Indeed, we received complaints that we were unfairly trying to scare students from living off-campus when we simply pointed to the crime data available on our website. The University regularly contacts City of Binghamton officials on matters affecting student safety and influenced the public release of police information concerning both the Ice House incident and the Hawley Street fight.

Student and community access to safety information can clearly be improved. It is ultimately the City of Binghamton that has control of and responsibility for safety information within its jurisdiction. While we remind you that the city is the proper target of your advocacy for improved access to that information, the University nonetheless has and will continue to be supportive of efforts to improve such access. Both the University and Pipe Dream helped promote the City of Binghamton’s new community notification app (Nixle) in November 2014. We support efforts to explore whether Nixle can be better used to provide residents with timely alerts and notifications impacting resident safety. The two of us have personally offered to assist Pipe Dream in identifying officials and offices where they can gain access to publicly available police information from surrounding communities. The University has been and will continue to be an advocate for timelier sharing of crime-map data by the city. The University has supported in the past — and will continue support — convening town and gown coalitions around specific safety initiatives, from housing inspections to Parade Day to the policing of State Street on weekends. More recently, the University has agreed with the City of Binghamton to pay half the salary of one Binghamton police officer to serve as liaison between the department and University students.

While remembering that the University has limited opportunity to share information that we do not readily access or control, we are willing to carefully consider what more we can do. We are actively reviewing off-campus programs at other colleges and universities for programmatic ideas and will carefully consider whether new initiatives can be effectively implemented in our environment. Further, we have offered to share with Pipe Dream (as the campus newspaper) information we may obtain about incidents affecting student safety off-campus unless there is a case-specific reason we cannot do so. As of the writing of this response, we have already shared information of incidents with the Pipe Dream staff.

We hope the above information offers a different perspective on the University’s efforts to promote access to information about safety off-campus than recent Pipe Dream opinion pieces. Our capacity to offer notice and alerts about off-campus matters is substantially different than it is about on-campus matters. The University has not tried to obscure information about off-campus crime and in many ways actively works to promote access to it. We close by observing that the City of Binghamton, other surrounding communities, the University, students and all community members have a shared stake in promoting safety. We will do better by promoting partnerships and cooperation among us than we will by throwing darts at one another. We genuinely thank the Pipe Dream for its interest and attention to off-campus safety and for their willingness to hear us out.

Timothy R. Faughnan, Chief of University Police

Brian T. Rose, Vice President for Student Affairs