CSI: Princeton

Remember when you visited Yale? The Gothic architecture (not as nice as here, of course) made you wonder if you hadn’t received your Hogwarts owl after all, just a few years late.Except then you peeked beyond the iron gates, remembered you were in America's fourth most dangerous city, and chose our quiet suburban idyll instead.Based on Public Safety’s 2011 Annual Security Report, you probably made the right choice. Campus crime is the lowest it’s been in a decade, although forcible sexual offenses rose from 11 to 13, arsons went from 3 to 5 (if setting posters on fire counts as arson), and there was an aggravated sexual assault.But if you want a closer look into the Orange Bubble’s seedy underbelly, skip the report and head straight for the daily crime log. That’s right, you can go to their website and see all the criminal activity reported on campus on this handy calendar, each and every day all the way back to 2006.But since clicking on each individual day is kind of a pain (especially since literally nothing happened most days) we put together a map showing all 37 incidents reported for the month of September.View Princeton September Crime Map in a larger mapSo, it’s not exactly a treasure trove of insights into the criminal mind, but there are a few points worth noting if you’d like to avoid becoming one of the little blue dots.Bike theft alone makes up over 20% of all reported crime, and the creativeness of Princeton’s pilferers calls for two additional categories (though I’m still not sure how theft and burglary – unarmed, fortunately – differ). All told, the three types of theft made up nearly half of campus crime last month.And though kleptomaniacs are clearly our biggest problem, there were a handful of more curious cases - fraud, or the mysteriously vague “criminal mischief” – along with a small number of genuinely concerning incidents.Hibben-Magie is really not someplace you want to be walking alone late at night. The campus masturbator and Tony Kadyhrob (aka Christopher Stalken) may be lying low for the time being, but it looks like there’s a new candidate for campus creeper. Seriously, though, it seems nowhere is safe – certainly not when someone’s reporting harassment at Campus Club on a Sunday evening. Buddy system, people – and bike locks never hurt.