Turn on the news or read a newspaper and you are bound to find a story about a local crime, possibly with speculation regarding a potential “rise” in crime.

We’ve gotta feva’, and the only prescription, it seems, is more news about crime and the stuff we do to “prevent” it.

And as much as I wish I could say Christopher Walken could put on his pants one leg at a time and then fight crime with a pair of golden handcuffs, that’s simply not the case. Because we do need more cowbell, but that cowbell is not the same old strategy we pull straight out of Law and Order and COPS.

For one, throwing the book at more offenders does not make us safer, and saying such actions do make a difference is similar to saying putting more two-year olds in timeout and giving them harsher penalties will stop the crying, tantrums and other hallmark behaviors of two-year olds.

I’m sorry, but no amount of timeout is going to get a little kid to stop crying, screaming and throwing a tantrum because they can’t have another popsicle. And similarly, demanding for the police to catch more criminals and punish them more severely isn’t going to cause our crime rate to take a nosedive.

Obviously, as numbers reported earlier in the year indicated, there has been a slight increase in crime on campus after a few steady years of decline. But these are misleading numbers.

For one, as is and has been the case on campus for years, out of the eight index crimes — murder, rape, assault, robbery, arson, larceny, motor vehicle theft and burglary — most crime is either larceny or burglary (breaking and entering). People aren’t getting killed, raped and beaten to within an inch of their lives — they’re forgetting to lock their cars and leaving their stuff unattended.

And the increase is largely attributable to the the wave of catalytic converter thefts on campus last fall, increasing the total number of crimes from 460 to 465.

I hate to break it to you, but a 1.1 percent increase in crime does not make our campus as unsafe as, say, the streets of Baghdad. It’s about the same, particularly since most of the crime is likely due to people cutting parts off of cars.

And a 1.1 percent increase doesn’t even come close to what criminologists call the “dark figure” of crime — the crimes that are committed but go unreported or undiscovered by law enforcement. This number could be as negligible as the 1.1 percent increase or as astronomically large as to give us reason to wonder why the hell we even have police in the first place.

But realistically, it’s probably not too big and not too small — it is more like Goldilocks’ “just right” – somewhere in the middle.

So instead of blaming Campus Police for this horrible new “crime wave,” we should see what we can do.

We can do more to bring a stronger sense of community to the University — informal social control can prevent crime over a larger area for less, whereas increasing law enforcement presence is limited by funding.

But what we shouldn’t do is spread news about a crime increase and assume it means the campus is in the grip of a crime wave.

Otherwise, the only spike in crime we’ll see is in the felony of being panicked, irrational and stupid, which is far more difficult to solve.

Send Paul your thoughts on crime on campus to [email protected].