Map showing occurrences of crimes reported to students by Ronnell Higgins. Click to enlarge.

Occurrences of crimes without map. Click to enlarge.

What do you do with the email updates from Ronnell Higgins? Some people worry, some people delete them without a second glance and some people joke about New Haven and the not-so-safety of our campus generally.

Silliman roommates JD Sagastume ’14 and Martin Shapiro ’14 decided to something a little bit more productive with the information. The pair constructed a map out of all the updates Ronnell Higgins has sent out since the beginning of the term. The map now shows all the crimes reported by Higgins for the period from 8/29/2010 to 2/9/2011. “Green dots represent robberies,” explains Sagastume. “The orange dot is a shooting. The red dot is a rape.” The map is missing data from the recent email about a serial rapist in the area, because it was impossible to pinpoint an exact location for the crimes.

Sagastume says he originally wanted to create the map because the perception of New Haven as a dangerous place made him nervous. “We had been told since day one by frocos, mentors, and other upperclassmen that certain areas of the city were ‘sketchy’, and we wanted to discover where exactly this sketch [sic] resided.” Making the map put a lot more context into Higgins’s emails, which Sagastume described as “abstract crime reports.” Sagastume says, “the thought of a weekend robbery at an obscure location like ‘Sachem and Winchester’ is far less potent than the thought of a robbery less than a block away from the hockey stadium I frequent on Saturday nights.”

“The map is by no means comprehensive for all crime in the area,” Sagastume says. Higgens’s emails don’t inform us of every crime and the map shouldn’t be used as an accurate barometer of the amount of crime that happens in New Haven. However, a map like this can definitely raise interesting questions about safety on Yale’s campus (particularly the area around Davenport and Pierson) and in off-campus housing.