CecilSafe

I have long been interested in understanding crime, and I focused my work in two Pomona courses to better understand what crime happens at Pomona and how it is portrayed and responded to.

I first looked at cameras on campus during Spring 2017 in Ways of Seeing with Arden Reed and Mark Andrejevic. I summarized my experiences dealing with the security bureaucracy and creating an artwork in dialog with the cameras in The Death of Sight. During this process, Campus Safety tried to limit my access to the Clery daily crime logs, which are public documents.

In the first issue of The Student Life newspaper in Fall 2017, I published an op-ed arguing for greater transparency and for the colleges to post their Clery logs on-line. Later that semester, the past 60 days of log data became available on-line.

Then in Spring 2018, some classmates and I created a database of crime instances for CSCI133 with Yuqing Melanie Wu. The full details can be found in the project report. The website is live at http://cecilproduction.herokuapp.com/. When we requested previous logs for the project, Campus Safety was more helpful and provided us with a PDF of all digital logs (about three years worth).

My work to promote access to the information about crime and safety on campus has been one of my long term projects at Pomona and I am glad to see progress being made.