| For what it's worth, I doubt either of my kids is always back in his or her room (apartment, dorm) by midnight. At times, they may not even leave to go out until around then. And one of my daughter's activities had her walking across the campus in the very wee hours on a regular basis, alone. Neither has ever had a problem, as far as I know.
That's not to say that things are perfectly safe. The police reports tell you they aren't, and things like bikes get stolen from time to time. A graduate student was shot to death near campus at 1:30 AM last fall (the first such incident in over 20 years, I believe).
But even the circumstances of that were telling: There were three muggings within the space of about two hours, including the fatal one, and the police immediately suspected that the same criminals were involved in all of them, because, even with thousands of students and staff, and a spread-out campus area, they rarely get that many robberies. The criminals were caught within a week, and were not from the nearby community at all -- they had driven miles to raid the campus. |