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highlighting college town news around the world
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| Noise Complaints, Arrests Tumble; Officials Credit Community Policing |
 Daily Hampshire Gazette, by Scott Merzbach
Statistics show new community policing and outreach continue to pay dividends in town. Officials at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the town are reporting a steep drop in police responses and arrests related to noise complaints and off-campus disturbances over the last five years. That, in turn, increases the quality of life of Amherst residents, officials say. "It's what we've been trying to establish with sector-based policing and commu-nity policing," said Amherst Police Chief Scott Livingstone. "It's starting to show its effects." Since the beginning of the 2012 school year, the noise complaints have dropped by 36 percent, from 748 to 480 in the recently completed school year. Supplementing the police interactions with students living off campus, both before and after incidents occur, is the voluntary party registration program known as Party Smart.
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| Specially Trained Nurses Serve Sexual Assault Victims and Justice |
University and community groups are partnering to help build a cadre of specially trained Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners. Overstreet, the house supervisor at Via Christi Hospital in Pittsburg, is a trained sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE). This year, PSU, PSU student groups and Via Christi Hospital have partnered with local law enforcement and social services to train up to four SANE nurses to serve the area. "In this community, we've had two trained sexual assault nurse examiners," said Kathleen Sandness, M.D., medical director at PSU's Bryant Student Health Center. Sandness said the lack of readily available SANE nurses meant that victims sometimes had to wait or go to facilities some distance away. Steve Erwin, PSU vice president for student life, said the university has been concerned for some time about the resources available to victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.
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| Multi-agency Working Helps to Tackle Anti-social Behaviour in Our Communities |
 Nottingham Trent University, by staff writer
NTU has partnered with Nottinghamshire police and Nottingham Community Protection to fund additional resources across their mostly densely populated student areas and city campus. Over the past year the university has funded an additional four Community Protection Officers and Police Community Support Officers to work on the most popular student nights. The patrols run between 8pm and 3am dependent on the night and hot spot areas. More recently patrols have been concentrating on the main corridor for students heading to the Student Unions night where reports of noise, street drinking and littering had been reported by local residents. These patrols have resulted in over 500 alcohol confiscations from students since 1st February 2017. To reinforce the positive relationship, NTU is funding a further four Community Protection Officers in the first two weeks of the academic year to present a proactive approach to ASB in the community.
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| Tragedy Results in a Teaching Tool |
Shortly after 3:30am on March 22, 2012, a fire broke out in an off-campus apartment in Edwardsville, taking the lives of Lacy Siddall, 21, and Lauren Peterson, 19. Now, a fire safety
video has been viewed nearly 32,000 times on college campuses around the country, according to a press release from Jaffe, a public rela-tions firm representing Simmons Hanly Conroy. The law firm represented the Petersen family in a lawsuit against an insurance company. They helped produce and fund the video, along with Tom Long, who represented the Siddall family.
From 2000-2014, Siddall and Petersen were among 126 college students who perished from fires that occurred on a college campus, in Greek housing or in off-campus housing within three miles of campus, according to the Center for Campus Fire Safety, a non-profit devoted to reducing the loss of life from fire at college campuses.
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| Students Asked to Love Where They Live and Get it Out for Cardiff |
Students moving out of halls of residence and private rented accommodation are being asked to show they love where they live and Get it Out for Cardiff (GIOFC). GIOFC is the City of Cardiff Council's award-winning recycling and re-use scheme in association with Cardiff University, Cardiff Metropolitan University and Univer-sity of South Wales, which helps students to clear out their rubbish at the end of the academic year. The aim is to ensure that moving out of the student accommodation at the end of term is stress-free and leaves our communities clean and tidy. In addition to normal waste collection and enforcement activity, this year the scheme includes: 23 Green Zone Collection Points across the city university sites; and 25 YMCA re-use banks to collect clothes, shoes, bags textiles, and other items.
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| Opportunities and Challenges Between Town and Gown |
The closing plenary of Going Global 2017 provided perspectives from city leaders and higher education ex-perts on the opportunities and challenges in the rela-tionship between city and university. Jean-Paul Addie from University College London opended the discussion, telling the audience that to be urban is to be contra-dictory, and institutions of higher learning need to grapple with this. "Most urbanization isn't happening in what we tradi-tionally think of as cities, but it is happening in suburbs of large cities and it presents unprecedented opportunities and challenges." Marie-Christine Lemardeley, Deputy Mayor for Higher Education, Paris City Hall, France commented on the role of students in the city. "I want to weave students and researchers into the fabric of Paris. Yerlan Aukenov, Deputy Mayor of Almaty, agreed, adding: "The university should be the heart of the city."
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