A student was recently attacked near an alley not far from the campus of Loyola University, but the crime has upset some because they say the university never told them it happened.
Chicago police said the attack and robbery happened back on Sept. 17 in the 6300 block of Lakewood Avenue at about 2:30 a.m. The victim was heading home, police said, when three men approached, hit her, knocked her to the ground and then ran off with all of her belongings.
“It’s horrible," Loyola student Ally Runnion said. "It’s also not surprising because you here about this stuff all the time."
The campus newspaper, the Loyola Phoenix, wrote about the attack and the fact that the university never informed any of the student body that it happened.
"It isn’t the job of the students to scrutinize police records, attend community meetings and hunt down information for their own safety while at the same time attend class, study, participate in extracurriculars and prepare for life after graduation," a recent editorial in the paper reads.
Loyola officials say they did nothing wrong by not reporting the attack to the campus community, and they stand by their decision.
"Alerts are sent based on geography and ongoing threat," Loyola officials said in an emailed statement. "If the situation meets that criteria, then the process for issuing an alert would start."
They said the crime happened outside of that geographic area, which did not require them to report it.
Runnion did the graphics for the Phoenix article. She says underreporting crimes by the university has been going for years.
“It’s not only people in the journalism community," she said. "Girls in my sorority are furious and want to start petitions to hold campus safety accountable.”
