BEYOND THESE STONE WALLS

An acceptance letter came as a moment of disbelief, a burst of excitement and a sigh of relief.

But a few months later, incoming freshman Ubong Akpaninyie was in for a surprise when scanning his brand-new Webmail inbox. There was no word on who his roommate would be or where he would be living, but rather news of a trio of robberies that had occurred just off campus during Summer Session I and tips on how to ward off criminals, courtesy of the University.

"I was shocked about the crime sprees," Akpaninyie said. "I hadn't really researched the crime in the city [before]. Duke doesn't have a reputation for violence."

Although most students said they feel safe on campus, periodic up-ticks in crime can cause them to call their safety into question. The month of January marked the murder of engineering graduate student Abhijit Mahato, the separate armed robberies of a graduate student and a Duke employee, the near-robbery of a recent Duke graduate and, in the greater Durham community, more than 30 robberies targeting Hispanics.

Gun violence and homicide rates in Durham have been on the rise for the past year. High-profile college campus murders like those of Mahato in January and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson in February have helped spark a heightened fear of crime.

Students are affected by city crime as well as crime on and immediately off campus. In October, a 22-year-old man was stabbed to death at Northgate Mall, a shopping center near East Campus that some students frequent. Four other people have been killed or injured on the mall's property since 1999, Durham Police Department representatives said.

Crime is an aspect of the city that is difficult to address on a campus tour, but it is something that registers on many students' radars at least occasionally after move-in day.

DPD and Violent Crime

Consequently, DPD and Durham County Sheriff's office purchased Gang-Net, a repository of national gang intelligence information. Not all of Durham County's law enforcement, however, is able to effectively use the technology, the grant application said.

In addition, law enforcement agencies operating in Durham County lack sufficient resources to place staff in the Bull's Eye area to address gang crime, Mihiach said.

The North Carolina Street Gang Prevention and Intervention Act, a bill to further the state's efforts to reduce juvenile gang activity, is pending in the state legislature.

Particularly following Carson's death, suspicions were raised about the suspects' backgrounds.

WRAL reported in March that photographs from Carson's slaying showed Laurence Lovette, who faces first-degree charges in both Carson and Mahato's murders, as wearing a hat with a potentially gang-related logo of the Houston Astros.

Additionally, Demario Atwater, who is also charged with first-degree murder in Carson's death, was told to avoid gang activity by a judge in 2005. Investigators later told WRAL, however, that it did not appear that either shooting was gang-related. DPD officers declined to comment during an interview with The Chronicle.

Education and Prevention

"Back in the late 90s, early 2000, nobody wanted to admit we had a gang problem. That threw us behind the curve," Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison said following the announcement of the $2.5 million Comprehensive Anti-Gang Initiative grant Wake and Durham counties received this year from the Department of Justice, according

to WRAL.

Over the next three years, funds from the grant will be aimed mostly toward prevention and education efforts, as well as target law enforcement resources and rehabilitation of convicts to return to society. Raleigh-Durham is one of four municipalities in the nation to receive the grant, in addition to six sites that received funding when the Anti-Gang Initiative debuted in 2006.

"If you are successful with prevention and intervention, then that will decrease the job by police officers for suppression," said James Howell, an adjunct researcher with the National Youth Gang Center.

He said the most difficult part of attacking the issue is getting people organized and working in the same direction against crime.

With the help of the $1.25 million split Durham received from last month's federal grant, city officials hope to set up a curriculum about gang education, Howell said. He added that the biggest problems grow "in the cracks of our cities," with family problems and a poor North Carolina public school system helping to lead juveniles into court.

"The gangs themselves are stronger in communities with the most deleterious conditions where community crime rates are high and where lots of kids have individual problems, most prevalent in the East side of Durham," he said.

Collaborating against crime

Violent crime has acted as a common denominator for universities in the Research Triangle Park.

The hues of Duke and Carolina Blue bled together last Spring, allegedly at the hands of 17-year-old Lovette. He has been charged with the murders of both Mahato and Carson, along with Stephen Oates and Atwater, respectively.

Latrese Curtis, a senior at North Carolina Central University, was found dead on the side of I-540 in Wake County in January. She had been stabbed nearly 40 times and may also have been sexually assaulted, according to an autopsy report.

The three institutions, still mourning the deaths of their students, are now banding together to identify and remedy the sources of youth and gang-related crime. A committee of administrators from Duke, NCCU and UNC has already met once and plans to meet again this Fall.

From their first meeting, administrators have agreed that boosting education will be one of the keys to steering youth away from lives of crime.

"Early childhood is a critical factor in addressing youth violence," said Dwayne Pinkney, assistant vice chancellor for finance and administration at UNC, who was present at the group's first meeting. "If kids enter kindergarten behind, that gap tends to persist. Later, in the middle school years you start to see some of the behaviors that are precursors to youth and gang violence."

The collaboration comes on the heels of several other gestures of Duke support to Durham schools. The University is spearheading a preschool program at E.K. Powe Elementary School, said Phail Wynn, Duke's vice president for Durham and regional affairs.

In addition, K-12 education and youth development will be a special focus of the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership in the coming year, said Sam Miglarese, director of community engagement for the Office of Community Affairs.

Wynn said he has been discussing the relationship between youth crime and education with President Richard Brodhead since Wynn began work this past Fall, but noted that the impact of the murders hastened the collaboration.

"We all recognize that the college-going rate in North Carolina could be improved [and] the drop out rate in the state of North Carolina needs to be addressed," Pinkney said. "But clearly the [murders] associated with the two campuses helped to focus attention on the issues."

The collaboration is promising because each institution brings a different set of resources to the table, Pinkney said. NCCU features a criminal justice curriculum, UNC has the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and Duke houses the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. Pinkney added that he is very optimistic about what the universities can achieve by working in concert.

Duke's response to crime

The University has a number of programs that encourage students to venture out of the "Duke bubble" and take advantage of cultural offerings in Durham, but that approach can be flipped on its head when it comes to campus safety.

Duke recently unveiled a number of new security measures-a new outdoor warning system is being installed and an emergency text messaging system is near completion-but these strategies were devised in response to the Virginia Tech shootings.

To quell student concerns following the Spring crime wave, the Duke University Police Department increased the number of patrol cars in its extended jurisdiction and hosted several workshops in a partnership with Graduate Student Affairs, outgoing DUPD Director Robert Dean wrote in an e-mail.

"Duke is an open campus and part of the community," Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta wrote in an e-mail. "It is an essential aspect of who we are as a University. While we work to keep students informed about safety concerns as we did during the Spring, and while we give them tools to be safe and provide a significant security infrastructure, there is no safety strategy that will work 100 percent of the time."

Mihiach said the police force works very closely with Duke Public Safety to prevent crime. He added that the University brings its crime concerns to DPD's attention during its daily morning briefings with DUPD.

DUPD, however, has suffered from extensive attrition, losing nearly 50 percent of its force since January 2006, which some officers told The Chronicle in April could affect how well the department protects students. At least four officers have left DUPD in 2008, and the University has hired Sibson Consulting to study the problem.

Safety has long been a top concern for graduate and professional students, the majority of whom live off campus and beyond the reach of many of Duke's safety measures. At a January forum on crime, graduate and professional students emphasized the need for an extension of the areas covered by SafeRides and other Duke-affiliated transportation programs and the need for better lighting in Duke parking lots and in other places around Durham.

No new safety measures addressing these concerns have since been announced. Dean referred questions on the matter to Charles Catotti, interim director of parking and transportation services, who could not be reached for comment.

Because of the Few Quadrangle renovations and the resulting housing crunch, many first-year international graduate students new to the United States have been denied space on Central Campus for the 2008-2009 academic year, said Alethea Duncan, president of the Graduate and Professional Student Council and a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in chemistry.

These students will be forced to live in apartment complexes close to campus-like The Anderson Apartments on Anderson Street, the site of Mahato's murder-where they are "easy targets" for criminals who are aware of the high concentration of students in those areas, she added.

Duke is not notified of a number of crimes that occur in off-campus graduate student communities, so these offenses often go unreported to the Duke community, Duncan said.

Several months after the crime spree, DUPD assembled the Student Advisory Council to provide undergraduate and graduate student feedback to the organization and inform the student body of the police force's services.

Senior Lauren Maisel, a member of DUPD-SAC, said the formation of the council is a positive development, but added that there is still much room for improvement with the department's services.

"I think progress is being made and discussions are being had," she said. "But I haven't seen any tangible progress. I haven't seen any solutions being implemented."

Most students interviewed said they feel Duke does an adequate job of keeping them safe.

Sophomore Zach Fuller said he has always felt secure on campus. He noted that he sees plenty of security guards patrolling campus and said he appreciates that administrators notify students in a timely manner when crimes do occur.

Sophomore Kristen Fricke, however, said she particularly feared violent crime at the beginning of the Spring semester-and felt the University could have done more to ensure her safety.

"You heard about [crime] all the time, it was in all the papers, but it felt like nothing on campus changed to reflect that," Fricke said. "It felt like students weren't really the top priority in that situation."

Rosch explained that students' perception of their safety is skewed by a few highly publicized events, like the Mahato and Carson murders, but noted that Duke is generally a safe campus.

"The probability of being harmed at Duke is pretty low compared to most other places," he said. "Very few crimes occur on campus. Is Virginia Tech a safe place? Yes, but if you'd asked people six months ago they would have said something very different."

Additionally, sophomore Lindsey Wallace attributed much of campus crime to a lack of awareness on students' part.

"There's only a small wall between real life and real crime and the bubble of Duke," she said. "We're next to a metropolitan area where there's a lot of poverty and a lot of crime, and we need to act accordingly-which I think a lot of people don't do."