Police from the Athens-Clarke County Police Department ride down East Clayton Street in Athens, Georgia. (Photo/ Gabrielle Vitali)
Downtown Athens, Georgia, is a place integrated into many University of Georgia students’ daily lives. Right across the street from the symbolic Arch on North Campus, students and locals can be seen filling the benches that line College Avenue, laughing and catching up with friends. As the sun moves across the sky, people come and go, sitting down to eat or packing their bags to head home for the day. When the dim street lamps flicker to life, downtown becomes filled with people heading to their nighttime destination. This daily cycle is familiar and expected to the people who frequently go downtown. That's what makes it so shocking when a normal day like this ended in crimes that affected UGA students.
The street sign for College Avenue hangs above the cross walk which leads to the University of Georgia. College Avenue is integrated into many students daily lives. (Photo/ Gabrielle Vitali)
In the span of three months during the 2021 fall semester at UGA, three major crimes involving students took place: an attempted kidnapping, a shooting and a fatal hit-and-run. All of these crimes took place in downtown Athens, being .5 miles at most from the Arch. The response from police and safety measures created for downtown and on campus have not changed since these crimes took place, making students worried for their safety in the future.
From 2020 to 2021, there was an increase in aggravated assault, kidnapping and sex offense cases, according to the Athens-Clarke County Police Department Transparency Hub-Crime statistics. In 2021 there were 49 more cases of aggravated assault, 10 more cases of kidnapping and 19 more of sex offenses.
Lieutenant Shaun Barnett of Athens-Clarke County Police Department said in an email that crowds downtown mainly determine where most of the police presence will be. In the email he said during the fall semesters, there is especially more police due to the increased crowds from UGA’s football games. Police are mainly seen downtown on bicycles, either sitting at populated corners or riding in the streets.
However, the night of the shooting, there were no police present in the area, said a sophomore at UGA.
The crimes and the aftermath
“I guarantee if there were cops there, he wouldn't have done that… like I walked past the spot where they all stand and they just weren't there,” the sophomore said.
In the early hours on Sept. 5, 2021, the sophomore was walking in between Soundtrack bar and Flanagan's Pub on East Clayton Street, when a man suddenly pushed her from behind and started shooting at a group of people. The sophomore immediately ran across the street to 1785, the bar where she works at. The man, later identified as 21-year-old Pharoah Williams, tried to enter 1785 earlier that night, but was denied several times. The sophomore and her co-workers believed that Williams got into a fight with a man who he thought was in 1785.
The sophomore said when she would work at 1785 on the weekends, she saw that the police increased their presence in response to the shooting. However, that only lasted for about a month until they stopped.
“I mean, I work every weekend. I see that area every weekend. And there's like two cops there every weekend. There's nothing,” the sophomore said.
Nicole Aussin, a UGA graduate student, faced a similar response from the police after her attack in the early hours of Aug. 20, 2021. That night, Aussin left Bar South to grab her car for her friends, as she was the designated driver. Aussin was walking on a well-lit street with pepper spray and her keys clutched in her hands, when she passed a man leaning against the side of a building.
“I remember when I saw that I was like ‘oh shit, this is real, this is bad’,” Aussin said.
The moment she passed him, he came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her and picked her off the ground. Then a gray, unmarked van pulled up beside them, according to the police report. She started kicking and screaming and managed to get out of her attacker's hold and punched him once in the mouth. As she swung again, he took off running.
After the attack, Aussin posted on Instagram of her bruised hand and a caption that told of the night’s events in hopes to bring awareness to prevent this from happening to someone else. Aussin got hundreds of responses from students in Athens and other college towns. She said that three of the responses she got said that a similar thing happened to them in the same location as her attack. Aussin said when she filed her police report she brought this up to the officer.
“We need to have people patrolling over here at the end of the night,” Aussin said. The police told her they are increasing their patrol in downtown, but Aussin said she sees them only on bicycles in front of a couple of bars.
Students reactions
Not only is the response seen from police an issue, but how the crime is communicated with students raises many of these worries. Through the fall 2021 semester, students received many emails from the university with the subject line “Special Safety Update.” These emails would give a brief description of the crime that took place and then would normally end with them asking for students to turn in any information they have to the ACCPD and/or the UGA Police Department.
“I just feel like it's like, oh, this happens and just goes on the news. And like nothing ever changes or like there's no safety protocols that are changed downtown or ...there's no like, programming for students that shows them like all the stuff that can happen downtown or in other places too,” Ellie Wade said, a junior at UGA. Wade was friends with Ariana Zarse and was there when she was struck by the car that resulted in her passing.
Campus at night
While downtown Athens is illuminated by dimly lit lamp posts, North Campus is even more so. Once past the Arch, a sidewalk sparsely lined with dim lamp posts runs through North Campus leading to the Main Library. Shadows from buildings and bushes loom on either side, creating many blind spots that make students walking alone at night nervous.
Emergency blue light systems are used on many college campuses across the country to increase student safety. According to the UGA Police Department website, UGA was “one of the first campuses in the nation to install emergency call boxes” but got rid of them when they realized the calls were none of an “emergency nature”.
To replace the absence of the blue light system, UGA created the ‘LiveSafe’ app, which features ways students can access resources if they are in an unsafe situation, allow students to monitor their friends movement if needed and access information on emergency plans.
Three UGA students responded to the school’s replacement of the blue light system with the app by claiming that students are “unaware” of the app or are “confused on how to use it”. The petition was created on Oct. 29, 2021, and they called for the reinstatement of the blue light system. Steve Harris, Director of the University of Georgia Office of Security and Emergency Preparedness, responded to the petition by linking to the department's FAQ webpage that explains why they got rid of the emergency system.
As the sun sets on another semester at UGA, there is a question as to what the 2022 fall semester will bring– given that the UGA's football team is now a national champion.