College security tighter, but is it enough?

When shots echoed across Georgia's Albany State University last month, students started running and police cars rushed onto the campus with sirens wailing. Several students lay wounded on the ground, and a gunman was using a hostage for cover.

Still under fire, campus police rescued wounded fellow officers as Albany and county police moved in to help. The gunman tried to escape and, after several minutes of chaos, members of the Albany police SWAT team found him dead and pulled the wounded students to safety.

Authorities said every law enforcement and emergency organization in Dougherty County responded, along with two hospitals and the county health department.

It was all a test.

Security ramped up on campuses
It has come to this: In the aftermath of highly publicized deadly shootings on college campuses, students have another ritual to add to the fire drills, safety lectures and harassment workshops that have characterized student life for decades. Now they have shooting drills.

Roberson Brown Jr., chief of the university police, said the number of shootings and emergencies on campuses made it necessary for law enforcement to hold such drills.

“Hopefully, it doesn’t occur, but we want the bad guys to know if they come, we are ready for them, whatever may occur,” said Brown, who gave his officers a "C" on the drill.

Nine months after five students were shot to death in a siege at Northern Illinois University and a year and a half after 32 others were killed by a deranged gunman at Virginia Tech University, college officials are ramping up police forces, installing brighter lights, building observation towers and attending security summits.

But students and faculty at schools large and small say the new attention to security isn’t easing their anxiety, and some are trying to take matters into their own hands. On dozens of campuses, student-led campaigns are under way to approve the carrying of concealed weapons.

Crime low, but homicides rising
Lori Berquam, dean of students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, acknowledged that for all the efforts to bolster security, “there is more fear, a heightened level of awareness.”

College homicides At least 13 college students have been killed on campuses so far this year. From 2000 to 2005, the national average was four. • Oct. 26: Ryan Henderson, 18, and Chavares Block, 19, were killed and a third student was wounded in a shooting at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. • Oct. 4: Luis Santos, 22, a student at Mesa College, was stabbed to death after a party on the campus of San Diego State University. • April 27: Tyshawn Bierria, 22, a student at the State University of New York College of Technology in Delhi, N.Y., died after she was stabbed in the predawn hours on campus. • April 18: Liette Martinez, 22, a student at Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne was found stabbed to death in her dormitory room. • March 4: Lauren Burk, 18, a student at Auburn University in Alabama, was found shot to death along a highway a half-hour after her car was found engulfed in flames on campus. Police said she was abducted on campus, robbed and killed elsewhere. • Feb. 14: Students Gayle Dubowski, 20; Catalina Garcia, 20; Juliana Gehant, 32; Ryanne Mace, 19; and Daniel Parmenter, 20, were killed when a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. • Feb. 8: Karsheika Graves, 21, and Tanieshia-Deanna Butler, 26, nursing students at Louisiana Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge, were shot and killed when a classmate opened fire in a classroom. The shooter also killed herself. msnbc.com research

Federal crime statistics offer little justification for that fear. Violent crime, in fact, remains so low on college campuses that they are among the safest places in the nation.

A Justice Department study found 62 violent crimes per 100,000 college students in 2004, compared with 462 per 100,000 Americans overall. That was the last year of a decade-long survey of campus crime by the Justice Department, but data reported under the federal Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990, also known as the Jeanne Clery Act, indicate that violent crime on campuses has not increased appreciably since then.

But saturation news coverage of the mass shootings at Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech have put a spotlight on homicides on campuses, which jumped in 2006 and 2007.

From 2000 to 2005, colleges and universities reported an average of four student homicides a year on campus to the FBI. In 2006, that number doubled to eight. Last year, it rose another 50 percent to 12, not counting the 32 killed at Virginia Tech.

That trend has continued so far this year: At least 13 college students have been slain on their campuses or after having been accosted on campus.

Such crimes are what instill a sense of fear among students.

“I actually live on campus and look out my window and see two places where assaults with a deadly weapon have happened,” said Mark D’Apolito, a student at the University of Toledo in Ohio.

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. The following NBC stations contributed to this report: KRIS of Corpus Christi, Texas; WALB of Albany, Ga.; WCMH of Columbus, Ohio; WDSU of New Orleans; WHEC of Rochester, N.Y.; WMC of Memphis, Tenn.; WMTV of Madison, Wis.; WNWO of Toledo, Ohio; WOWT of Omaha, Neb.; WSLS of Roanoke, Va.; and WTHR of Indianapolis.

At the University of Memphis in Tennessee, Zebonique Petties, a senior, said it made no difference that authorities put up watch towers, surveillance cameras and police call boxes on campus after Taylor Bradford, a well-known football player, died after being shot in his car late last year.

The measures have done nothing to calm her fears, Petties said, adding: “The security to me is lame, basically.”

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