Bailey Singletary is a junior majoring in communication. She can be contacted at [email protected].Sadly, small town doesn’t always translate into safe town. While I’d feel safer walking alone down the street in Starkville than I would in downtown Brooklyn, that’s no reason to test it out and see how long I live.
After everything that’s happened to students on campus from attacks to burglaries, I guess people that are being careless with themselves and their stuff are just waiting for something bad to happen to them before they smarten up.
Campus isn’t the only place that’s unsafe. We just have Bad Dawgs to let students know what to watch out for. For example, earlier in the year, items in my car and a dozen others were stolen in the Old Charleston neighborhood after we mistakenly didn’t lock our car doors. Luckily, a guest in my house saw and caught the college-aged thief and made him surrender everything in his pockets before he ran away between some storage buildings.
Even though it wasn’t safe for my friend to chase the guy in order to impress about six girls, the thief, luckily, was too wasted from the anxiety pills in his pocket even to attempt to fight back. But the situation would have been completely different if he had taken control and fought or had been armed with a weapon.
And although the Starkville Police Department is very much appreciated for the things they do, we can’t just rely on them to help out in every situation, because in the Old Charleston case, they never showed up after our neighbors called when they saw the guy outside rummaging through cars. So, unless you are looking to be charged with anything alcohol-related, you might want to first use the common sense you were born with before using the police department as a good way out.
Another situation that students should be careful about is walking around alone or, as we were all warned as children, taking rides from strangers. After two friends of mine finished a gig at Mugshots, they were loading up their equipment and noticed a girl sitting in her dress on the sidewalk crying because her ride had left her at the bar. Being Southern gentlemen, they offered her a ride home because they were sober and didn’t want to leave her sitting there.
Meanwhile, a police officer sat in his car across the street watching the whole event. As soon as the girl got in the car and my friends began to drive away, the police officer flipped on his blue lights and pulled them over.
After giving the driver a field sobriety test, the police officer asked the woman if she knowingly took a ride from two guys she didn’t know. He lectured to her for a few minutes, and truthfully, he was right, because she shouldn’t have gotten in the car with them even though they were the “good guys.”
None of this is news to anyone, because anytime something happens, every student gets an e-mail with a reminder of ways to stay safe.
But I think it’s past time we stop waiting for a disaster to happen before change comes about. There’s no point in waiting for a handful of people to die before we start really changing stuff.
And while Starkville is a moderately safe town, there are still drunk girls wandering down Main Street, walking home alone from the bar, vulnerable to those who wish to cause harm, and there are people who leave their cars unlocked at the Sanderson Center practically begging someone to steal something.