Walking under the black-massed canopy of trees, there is a rustling among the dark leaves. Inside the hollow, cold tunnel, footsteps echo. Amidst the pounding of a heart, a scream resounds in the distance.
OK, so walking on campus at night is not quite a horror movie reality. In comparison with other major cities — or even semi-major, as our capital city remains, Raleigh doesn’t offer the same amount of throngs of violence and mayhem to her residents.
But that still doesn’t mean campus is a safe haven for students to meander alone in the dark. Campus Police offers a safety escort service after dark to protect the lives of students, faculty and staff on campus.
However, some students aren’t sure how to take advantage of the escort service. Elizabeth Gray, a sophomore in agricultural education, said she had heard of safety escorts, but never fully understood how the system worked.
“I thought those little blue lights were only for if you were getting raped or killed or something,” Gray said.
Blue light phones are located all over campus. A map of these phones is available on the Campus Police Web site.
Between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m. campus escorts await calls from students who need to be accompanied along the journey through campus.
After receiving a call, Campus Police will provide a student patrol officer to either walk with or drive a person to his or her destination. Each SPO has an identification card and wears a red shirt with the words “NCSU Student Patrol.”
Robert Myers, a junior in business, said he began working as a SPO in November of last year.
“I feel like we provide a valuable service to the University, and it’s something that more students need to know about,” he said, “If more people are aware, then more people will take the proper precautions.”
However, SPOs do more than just wait around for students to call, according to Myers. They assist Campus Police in a number of tasks — they make sure buildings are locked up and secure, check blue lights and surveil suspicious persons, to name some.
Myers said the biggest concern of the SPOs, though, is to do everything possible to make students and faculty feel secure on campus between dusk and dawn.
While the campus escort service exists primarily to assist students and the rest of the University, Myers said he recently noticed students taking advantage of the safety escort service.
“If they miss the bus or just don’t feel like walking, they’ll call us. Our purpose isn’t to just give people rides,” Myers said. “It’s to help someone who feels unsafe to get where they’re going.”
The van, or “SPO-mobile” as it is affectionately called by safety officers, is the only form of transportation available to escorts and those they accompany. When it goes out, or is being used already, the only choice left is to walk.
Perhaps with this realization, more people will reconsider when they simply want a free ride to class.
“Out of everything our purpose is to make N.C. State a safer place,” Myers said. “We make it safer, one escort at a time.”
