Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support the IDS in College Media Madness! Donate here March 24 - April 8.
Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

SafeIU blog continues to keep students informed about crime on, off-campus

campus filler

IU Notify keeps students in the loop about major crime trends and emergencies on campus, but Tracy James said students who only pay attention to IU Notify miss out on a lot.

That’s why James, communications manager for IU Public Safety and Institutional Assurance, started SafeIU, a blog meant to keep students informed about crime news in Bloomington.

Justice Eiden, IUSA chief of student affairs, said just knowing about these incidents can keep students out of harm’s way and help them make good decisions that could potentially save their lives.

“Knowledge is power,” he said. “If students know that there’s something going on, they can be cautious and make smart decisions on where they should go and what they should do there.”

While the website was launched last year, James said it has really kicked off this semester with a steady flow of posts. The blog now offers an email subscription to readers and features 18 stories from information she’s gleaned from the IU and Bloomington police departments.

After she noticed students often leave doors unlocked for possible thieves, James decided to remind them of the importance of locking doors in a blog post. She said tips and reminders like this are where IU Notify falls short.

She said there are also more long-term problems like drug overdoses and the opioid crisis that emergency alerts can’t fully cover.

“This is good information, but students aren’t getting it through emergency alerts,” she said. “There’s a lot that kind of gets lost without having this blog.”

Eiden said IU does not exist in a bubble. Students live off campus. They grab lunch and study at cafes off campus and they go to football games and parties off campus. As a result, he said it’s important for students to have information about incidents that happen off campus — something IU Notify doesn’t offer.

“There’s no single student that stays on or off campus 100 percent of the time,” he said. “If there’s a stabbing in Dunn Meadow, students need to know, but if there’s a stabbing on 19th Street, students also need to know.”

Eiden said the blog also links to crime map information that covers all of Bloomington. He said this map can keep students aware of areas where certain crimes occur more often, which is especially important when choosing off-campus housing.

James said it’s easy for student to get caught up with schoolwork and forget what’s going on around them. This is why she wants to make resources such as crime maps, IUPD and BPD websites and social media, City of Bloomington programs and local newspapers readily available for students under the blog’s resources tab.

“We try to give them tools so that they know how to find the information that affects them,” she said.

Despite these tools, Eiden said students aren’t getting all the information they need to be safe. He said IUSA and James are working together to publicize the blog so that students realize this information is available to them.

One possible future step is to get the blog on IU’s email Listservs, Eiden said.

“It’s just not reaching enough students,” Eiden said. “But it really should. It’s here to keep them safe.”

James said it’s also important to listen to the students, to pay attention to what students are asking questions about on social media and to share that information with them.

But communicating with students is a two-way street, she said. As the IU PSIA reaches out to students, she said she hopes the students will interact with them as well.

“We want to provide information but also give students the opportunity to ask us questions,” she said. “We want to know what students and staff need to feel safe.”

Get stories like this in your inbox
Subscribe