How safety concerns on campus have gone from bad to worse

If you’ve ever been a part of BLSA Help Squad, the group that helps the fresh-faced students move into their new student accommodation, chances are that you will have been asked at some point whether “it’s safe around here?”

It’s a tricky question to answer, one that requires balancing the realities of living in East London without scaring the living daylights out of a Fresher and their family. My answer to that has always been that “as long as you’re sensible and take reasonable precautions, then you’ll be fine”. With every year though, that question has left me requiring more and more pause for thought; and now from everything I’ve seen - I’m not sure I can say that anymore.

The Metropolitan Police stats for January to October 2019 leave us in no uncertainty as to the scale of the problem. There were 29,193 crimes in Tower Hamlets over this period, giving it the award of being the sixth most dangerous borough in London, providing the filling in an undesirable sandwich between our neighbours Hackney and Newham. While those numbers paint a broad picture, the real problems seem to start and end much closer to home; there is an overwhelming failure by QMUL to deal with problems already known to them.

Recurring problems, recurring failings

Whether it’s witnessing a stabbing outside of the Garrod Building, being verbally assaulted by a rough sleeper or being followed leaving the library – students here experience things that no other students do. While it may be possible to attribute some of those to the reality of the area we study in, too many are a result of the inaction, bordering on incompetence from the University and its security team.

One of the biggest issues facing security on Whitechapel campus is the lack of clarity for students over what comes under their jurisdiction, where it overlaps with that of Barts Health NHS Trust and indeed, what isn’t their jurisdiction at all. In theory, regardless of whether it is strictly on QMUL land or not, any incident that occurs to a student because they were accessing a University building should be reported to Whitechapel security.

In practice however, a significant number of incidents that occur to students go unreported. While there are many reasons for this, it is at least partly due to the fact that many incidents occur on the streets around QMUL buildings, and security, despite lobbying from student representatives, have failed to bring in an easy way to reporting incidents occurring around Whitechapel. Fundamentally then, we are left with a security team who are unaware of the realities of being a student here.

Of course, one of the biggest reasons that students don’t report incidents to security, is that from experience, they have very little faith that they will do anything to resolve or prevent the same incident occurring again. What’s the point in reporting your bike stolen from the Library secure area, when nothing has changed from the last time a bike was stolen, or worse, that security saw your bike being stolen but did nothing about it (as one student was told). By the third time you’ve reported that people are shooting up within the library courtyard, it becomes hard to believe that the University cares about your safety and wellbeing.

During rehearsals for BL Drama’s last Panto, students became better acquainted with the people smoking and dealing illicit drugs on the steps outside of Laird Hall (having reported them since mid-October) than security themselves, apart from one time they came in to make sure we had booked the room. To me as a student, the message was clear - this is a University that prioritises room bookings over student safety.

Can money alone fix these issues?

The scale of the issues described above means it’s unlikely there will be a quick fix – though the University is certainly taking this issue more seriously of late. Upon learning of the scale of the issue, Professor Colin Bailey, the Principal of Queen Mary University of London, has pledged over £1 million to improve security across all campuses. Among the improvements being proposed are overhauls of CCTV, security personnel wearing bodycams and perhaps most promising of all, an increase in the number of patrols.

While these are certainly steps in the right direction, there is no sign of yet that there have been efforts to improve the flawed culture of listening to students at Whitechapel. The University leadership prides itself on what it calls a culture of ‘co-creation’, a buzzword they have adopted to prove that they have put student voice at the centre of what they have done last few years. In the same period however, student reps (including myself) had seen our concerns about safety being brushed aside by University staff; such as ignoring our calls to improve lighting around the Library, Floyer House, Laird Hall, the Blizard Building and the BLSA Building. It was only after considerable lobbying efforts that we were able to get the University to install new lighting outside of one of the buildings requested, the Garrod Building, with obvious improvement.

Without this sign that the University aims to rebuild the trust between students and security that it so sorely needs, Queen Mary’s investment in security will simply paper over cracks. Students need to be able to not only see security (instead of them being hidden away in the Garrod Building watching telly), but believe that when they report something to them, they care enough to do what they can to prevent it happening again. If they don’t listen to students, I’m afraid that the next time a prospective student asks whether this campus is safe, students will be forced to tell them something that could scare them away. In the meantime, we as students will have to take more responsibility over our safety – if only the University would take some responsibility too.

University statement in full:

Queen Mary is more than aware of various security issues on the Whitechapel campus. Our Security team at Whitechapel aims to support our students and keep them safe within this environment. Our team move criminals such as drug dealers and tailgaters off campus frequently and we ask that students who witness such anti-social behaviour to immediately report this to Security so that firm action can be taken. We have set out the following enhancements and plans for the way in which the security service is provided at our Whitechapel campus:

• An additional million pounds is to be spent on additional security staff for all campuses. For Whitechapel this means one extra security guard on duty at all times

• The recruitment of a University Crime Reduction Manager to be proactive in reducing opportunist crime • £250K already spent on improving CCTV and a full upgrade currently out to tender

• Access Technology to be replaced

• A consultation on the idea of having a local Police Officer assigned to the University

• Improved liaison and information sharing agreement with the Neighbourhood Police team

• Our Crime Prevention Advisory Group includes the Students’ Union and the local Police and Tower Hamlets Enforcement teams