Salma Ibrahim, Contributor
Featured image courtesy of YFile
The time is up on the report guiding safety policy at York, and students admit to feeling no real improvement in the safety culture on campus.
Safety and security policies on campus over the last five years have been largely guided by the METRAC report of 2010 entitled, Leading the Way to Personal and Community Safety. This was an audit conducted to improve safety and security outcomes at York. It included a total of 110 recommendations with an implementation time of five years or under.
These recommendations focus on issues like brighter lighting, better security services, and sexual assault awareness campaigns. In its last annual report to the President’s office, the Community Safety Council’s audit committee declared that 72 out of the 110 recommendations were either completed or ongoing.
These recommendations were designed specifically to improve safety culture and outcomes on campus. Accordingly, completing such a substantial number of the recommendations should have resulted in significant changes in increased safety on campus.
Joanne Rider, York media, says, “the number of incidents reported in the first quarter of 2015-2016 decreased by 11 per cent compared to the first quarter of 2014-2015.”
However, this statistic does not appear to resonate with students.
Students’ response to whether or not they see improvements to the safety culture at York were mixed.
Aaliya Khan, a recent York graduate, thinks the work York has done is mainly to say that they’ve done something. She says she has not seen a “paradigm shift,” but rather, “more lighting.”
She acknowledges that there are awareness campaigns and training around key safety issues like sexual assault awareness, but believes most of this is “preaching to the choir.”
Lighting is not such a negligible issue to some students like Ruhi Momin, who has evening classes. Momin admits leaving her class during the halfway break so that she doesn’t have to walk through the dark pathways from Vanier College too late at night.
She thinks the frequency of security bulletins she receives now, compared to in her first year, are generally the same and, for her, is the sign that there has been no improvements to safety outcomes on campus.
“York needs to focus their energy and money somewhere more productive as opposed to just buying chargers,” she says.
In the METRAC report of 2010, survey results showed that York students believed the biggest contributor to safety issues on campus was “systemic oppression.” Systemic oppression is defined in the report as discriminatory actions rooted in “policy, practice, or programs.”
York administration has appointed the first Executive Director of the Department of Community Safety, Samina Sami.
Gary Brewer, vice-president, Finance and Administration, the department overseeing campus safety, says, “Ms. Sami has the experience and commitment needed to bring members of our community together to develop a holistic and integrated strategic approach to community safety at York.”
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