March 3, 2006

One night at MC . . . in Thomas Hall

By AMY BITELY
arb001@marietta.edu

Believe it or not, our campus is littered with valuable objects. True, there are no Hope Diamonds or chests of gold or even Declarations of Independence lying around, but we do have a campus full of flat-screen monitors, shiny computers, valuable pieces of ethnic art, and rare early-edition books. This brings forth the obvious question--how easy would it be for someone to steal this stuff? To find out, I decided to test Campus Police’s awareness of buildings on campus by staying in Thomas Hall all night.

It would have been too hard to explain that I was trying to write an article if I got caught carrying out flatscreens.
I settled into the Writing Center at seven o’clock for my work shift. Nothing to see here, folks; just a group of students studying, checking e-mail, and going over papers. The center closed at nine, and I had a pair of tutoring students over to study for a government exam. Campus Police passed by some time around ten o’clock, but the officer on duty barely gave us a glance before moving on to lock other doors. We were college-age students, engaged in a college-type activity, in a college building--surely there was only one logical conclusion to make?
The problem is, though, that this campus is not small enough for Campus Police to recognize every student on sight. Not every person who looks college-age is a student at Marietta, and not every person who appears to be studying is in fact going over the three branches of U.S. government. It would be all too easy for a college-age person with nefarious designs to stay after hours in a public place such as the Writing Center, wait until Campus Police had passed through and ignored the “studious student,” and then make off with hundreds of dollars worth of college supplies.

Around two o’clock, my stamina had run out, one of my students had left, and Campus Police hadn’t been back through--the air in the Writing Center grew chilly, perhaps because heating a building at two in the morning is not a very good idea, economically speaking. All things considered, I decided that I’d figured out what Campus Police did when a student stayed a long time after hours, and I didn’t need to stick around all night to stare at the halls for another six or seven hours. I had class in the morning, after all. I was going to be spending the rest of the day in Thomas anyway.

I packed up my things, locked up the Writing Center, told my student goodnight, and began the walk from Thomas Hall to my dorm. It was very dark at two in the morning; the lamps along the sidewalk sent a warm, fuzzy glow over the cement, and the trees cast long shadows across the ground. It was the kind of atmosphere in which thieves and villains probably lurked with intent to steal things from Thomas Hall, and in that half-awake, half-uneasy mindset, I saw a dark figure striding across the sidewalk to the building that I had just left.

It wasn’t a thief, or even a villain. It was a Campus Police officer. The police vehicle lay in wait on the Mall, and the officer looked me up and down before wishing me a good night.
Even if I had been in Thomas attempting grand theft flatscreen, the central location of the campus police vehicle on the Mall--as well as the constantly patrolling officers--ensured that I wouldn’t have gotten far before being caught red-handed. The subterfuge of “studying” wouldn’t have helped me when the Campus Police officer radioed for backup, and the webcam on top of Hermann Fine Arts would have provided photographic proof of my misdeeds as I attempted to escape down the Mall.

Let that be a lesson to both late-night studiers and would-be thieves: even if there are no diamonds or chests of gold on campus, our security remains more or less airtight.