The same warning is embedded in every public safety e-mail: Students must be careful to lock their doors.
Just like Department of Public Safety officers, students play an integral role in contributing to the safety of the greater Georgetown community. We should take that role seriously. Making sure to lock our residence doors is a basic yet important step towards achieving that safety.
Yet there is only so much students can do. A resident of Alumni Square can – and should – do everything in her power to protect herself from burglars by following the steps suggested by DPS. The same is true for residents of any other campus dorm or apartment building, even in more “dangerous” areas like Village A or Prospect Street. If they turn their keys far enough in one direction, their doors will lock. It’s as simple as that. Or is it?
Not for dozens of Hoyas living in university-owned townhouses. Several of these houses, which contain mail slots in the middle of their doors, are designated as historic by the Georgetown Historical Society.
This is all well and good, except for the fact that these houses are laughably easy to break into using security flaws in the doors’ locking mechanisms and mail slots. Yet students cannot alter the exterior of their historic homes to fix the problem.
So far, lock changes have been the only help the university has provided for students concerned that their townhouses will be burglarized because of their door’s faulty mail slot design. But a lock change is no help when one lock is just as easy to open as another through mail slots. No matter how many precautions these students take, their residences remain vulnerable.
That the university has failed to adequately address this problem is unacceptable. The slots could be sealed shut from the inside, and exterior boxes added outside of the townhouses in question. At the very least, some sort of mechanism on the inside of doors could fix the problem.
The university should consider these alternatives if it is serious about protecting the safety of its townhouse residents. If Hoyas cannot sleep soundly inside their own residences, then where can they feel safe?
