A recent incident in which six Keene State College students’ vehicles were vandalized has many wondering about the safety of their cars off campus.
On the night of Tuesday, Sept. 13, six students came back to their vehicles parked on the corner of Elliott and Adams Street to find their tires had been slashed.
“It was kind of a surprise; you think ‘Oh Keene, it’s fairly safe you know?’” said KSC sophomore Brittney Cardente, one of the students whose vehicle was vandalized.
Cardente said, “It’s not necessarily scary, just annoying. What if it happens again? It’s not like campus safety can do anything about it off campus.”
According to the Keene Police Department, this is actually a fairly common incident.
“These types of incidents come in spurts, there won’t be any for a while and then there’ll be a decent amount of them around the same time,” a spokesperson for the department said.
“Usually [the investigations] are a dead end. Sometimes, they result in an arrest or conviction, but the guys who do this usually slink away into the night,” said a KPD spokesperson.
The Keene Police Department regularly patrols residential neighborhoods looking for any sort of trouble, including vehicle vandalism, but due to limited resources in many cases, these crimes go unsolved according to their spokesperson.
Photo Illustration by Tim Smith / Photo Editor
“There’s only so many cops in the police department. We can’t put a cop on every street corner.”
It is for this reason, according to Cardente that many of the victims of this incident chose simply to get their vehicles fixed without filing an official report with the Keene Police Department.
Nevertheless, this particular incident, due to the number of cars that had their tires slashed, has many students thinking twice about parking their cars off-campus.
KSC sophomore Laura Dunfey-Ehrenber said she was surprised to learn about this form of vandalism. Dunfey-Ehrenber said she usually parks her car in the Winchester lot.
“I wouldn’t have felt uncomfortable [parking my car off campus] before, but after hearing about this, I’m definitely a lot less comfortable parking off-campus at night,” she said.
“I’ve always locked my car when leaving it overnight in a public lot or on the street, but I never worried about my tires getting slashed,” said Dunfey-Ehrenber.
Campus Safety declined to comment on the incident, as it was an off-campus incident.
As was stated by the KPD spokesperson, having officers making rounds can help to prevent this kind of vandalism from happening.
Anyone with information on this incident is encouraged to call the Keene Police Department at (603) 357-9815.
Will Durie-Poliwoda can be contacted at wpoliwoda@kscequinox.com
