By Anna Cappella
On March 16, the Carnegie Mellon Police Department (CMUPD) sent out an email safety alert about an indecent assault that occurred on Penn Avenue near Target. The email contained a 170-word description of the assault, including very specific details about the time, location, and nature of the assault. A similar email was sent on March 3, about a sexual assault and robbery that occurred on Melwood Avenue.
While I understand that the purpose of these emails is to keep the student body informed and safe, I question if the details included in these emails really serve that purpose. Is it not enough to generally know the type of assault and the location? I doubt that when I’m deciding whether to walk alone at night, I’ll be thinking about how a “brief struggle” ensued after the assailant took the victim’s cell phone on March 3 at 2:15 a.m.
Given that the student body has no use for all these details, I wonder why they are included. Are we meant to be scared by some of the graphic information we’re given? Sure, that might keep us from putting ourselves at risk of attack, but is that really the purpose of our campus police department? Does that reflect the type of relationship we want to have with them? And is the privacy of these assault survivors really a price we’re willing to pay for potentially keeping ourselves safe?
I don’t think I want to pay that price. Assuming that the survivors gave consent for the general release of their case information, I can hardly imagine that they would have wanted 7,000+ college students to read what happened to them. Also, apart from the fact that students sometimes visit the locations described in the emails, these assaults had no relationship to Carnegie Mellon, and in both cases, CMUPD were not called to respond to them. Both cases were handled by the City of Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.
My reaction to both of the alert emails was that they felt intrusive and did not handle sexual assault information with the same care I believe it should be treated with. I believe that alert emails could still protect and inform the Carnegie Mellon community without sharing so many details and potentially violating the wishes of survivors or the boundaries of students. I’m glad that CMUPD is looking out for us everywhere we go, but I think that when sharing information about incidents in the area, there is a limit on how much information is appropriate to share.
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