For some students, Fort Sanders can become a boogeyman of a neighborhood, making a walk at night through the area scary.
The UT Police Department is familiar with this perception, and UTPD is looking to change it.
With this goal in mind, UTPD launched the Welcome to UT Safety Campaign, targeting UT students in Fort Sanders for door-to-door, informational sessions on Aug. 9 at 10 a.m.
"Both KPD and the university have implemented strategies, resulting in crime reduction in the Fort Sanders community," UTPD Chief Gloria Graham said. "However, we consistently receive feedback indicating there are a lot of misperceptions regarding the climate of the area."
The campaign is named "See something. Say something."
"The goals are to maintain the momentum in terms of crime reduction, correct misperceptions by providing factual data to residents and enlist those community members to partner with us and share the responsibility of safety in the Fort Sanders community," Graham said.
UTPD Public Information Officer Lt. Emily Simerly said a list of students with addresses in the Fort Sanders area is being compiled, with heavily populated student areas being targeted first.
"The specific campaign targeting students in the Fort Sanders area prior to the beginning of the school year was conceived by Chief Gloria Graham," Simerly said. "Our focus is educating students who live in the Fort Sanders area about safety information, real crime data versus perceived data and being a resource for them should they have questions or concerns."
UTPD staff members will participate, and UT stakeholders from places like the Knoxville Police Department and the Fort Sanders Neighborhood Association, have been invited to participate as well, she said.
Those going door-to-door are to meet at the UT Police Department Community Room at 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 9 to receive talking points, handout materials and a target location list.
Simerly said the campaign name came from the idea of broken windows.
"Consider a building with a few broken windows," Simerly said. "If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Broken windows is a metaphor for any undesirable issue, including broken couches on lawns, noise ordinance violations, criminal offenders loitering, et cetera, becoming a norm."
The emphasis is on students to speak up when they see something in the Fort.
"We will encourage students that if they see something undesirable, they should tell someone who can fix the problem," Simerly said. "Undesirable issues could include anything from building code violations to crimes in progress."
Simerly said this campaign dovetails with UTPD's primary mission, community safety, including student safety.
"Daily, we strive to gear all our efforts toward such," Simerly said. "This includes focusing on pedestrian safety in crosswalks, teaching self-defense courses, free security assessments for residences — including those privately owned, rented or leased — educational programming regarding alcohol issues, et cetera."
She also said this campaign is not the only safety event UTPD orchestrates.
"UT helps facilitate multiple safety events throughout the year, including Safety Day, which occurs every September," Simerly said. "While enforcement of laws is sometimes necessary in our law enforcement role, our main focus is community education. We would much rather educate students to make safe choices than to enforce some type of sanction for a law violation."
In addition to the Aug. 9 event, UTPD will have educational and enforcement saturation throughout the fall, she said.
"These events will be in conjunction with the Knoxville Police Department and target specific crime locations or problems identified through crime analysis," she said.
Blue light phones are located primarily in the 16th Street and White Avenue area. While she said there was no funding at this time for more blue phones in the Fort Sanders area, she said improvements on the existing phones are coming.
"The university is focused on upgrading existing campus blue phones with a public address system feature," she said. "The blue phones located within the Fort Sanders area were among the first on campus to be upgraded with this feature. We anticipate all remaining blue phones will be upgraded by the end of fall 2011."
Wes Hicks, rising junior in civil engineering, lived in Fort Sanders last year in a house on Clinch Avenue. That point forms the dividing line between the area in the Fort where he thinks it is safe and the area in the Fort where he thinks it is not safe.
"Toward Vol Hall, yes, toward the edge of it, no," Hicks said. "... Any farther in the Fort, then yeah, I would have been scared. I feel like Clinch is probably the last street I'd feel safe on, just because it's near Vol Hall."