Evanston definitely is, and my friends at USC and UCLA who are from the Bay say that crime is way, way lower at each school than it is at Berkeley. Yes, other schools are going to be safer than Berkeley. Check the stats for violent crime on and around campus, check Berkeley’s niche rating for crime vs. any other campus. I’m getting notifications nearly every day about students being robbed at gunpoint, r-ped, beaten with poles, getting rocks thrown at them, random men wandering into student dorms to m-sturbate in women’s bathrooms, etc. If I could complete my Berkeley degree online, that’d be fantastic. But alas, they don’t offer that as an option. I also would not have been a victim of crimes in those cities, as I have already been numerous times at Berkeley. The fact that I repeatedly called their BearWalk hotline to get someone to walk me home and then got sexually assaulted on this campus because nobody deigned to show up and they kept hanging up on me, I a) have absolutely no faith in the university to do anything it says it’s going to do, ever, and b) feel deeply unsafe just physically being on that campus. Somewhere else is not going to have all of that negative history attached to it, and at private schools (which are my targets), they actually have the funding, resources, and short enough wait times to access services that doing one’s due diligence is actually enough. Here at Cal, doing my due diligence doesn’t matter. Yes, BearWalk and UCPD exist to protect me in exactly these kinds of situations. But when they just repeatedly hang up on me or forget about me for hours on end when I do rely on them - when they’re completely useless any time they’re called upon - that doesn’t do me much good, does it? This has been my entire experience at Berkeley. Everything I need technically exists, but it’s been inaccessible any time I actually needed to use it.
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