Public Safety security report details increase in burglaries

A series of vehicle break-ins at Chapman Grand Apartments reiterate a three-year trend of increasing burglaries revealed in Public Safety’s 2020 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report. Graphic by HARRY LADA, Art Director

After unloading his camera equipment from his car, sophomore film production major Justin Appell locked the doors of his Honda Accord, assured by the shrill beep of confirmation. With his vehicle tucked away on the third floor of the Chapman Grand Apartments parking structure, he headed inside for the remainder of the evening.

“It was just a normal night, just like every other day at Chapman Grand (Apartments),” Appell recalled. 

Except it wasn’t, because Appell’s car was broken into. 

Appell was one of four victims of a Jan. 3 burglary that occurred in the parking structure after two suspects, caught on video surveillance footage, shattered the windows of cars on different floors and stole contents from within. In Appell’s case, the only casualties from the crime were a stolen empty wallet and some shards of glass on the passenger seat. 

“There was a BMW parked right next to my car, and I’m like, ‘Really, you break into the Honda Accord and not the BMW? OK,’” Appell said. 

This break-in, which cumulatively qualifies as four separate burglaries, prompted a Jan. 7 email crime notification from Public Safety to all student residents living at Chapman Grand. These incidents follow a three-year trend of increasing burglaries on Chapman property, established in the 2020 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report.

Chief of Public Safety Randy Burba released the 97-page document in a Chapman-wide email Dec. 31, which contains information about campus security and criminal offense statistics from both on and off campus grounds, as required by The Clery Act. The report, which spans the academic calendar years of 2017 to 2019, found that although the total amount of on-campus burglaries was as low as three and the amount of off-campus burglaries was reportedly at zero in 2017, that number surged to 17 and eight, respectively, by the 2019 calendar year. 

“We have certain incidents that I would call outliers, and that’s basically where one incident gives us multiple statistics,” said Rick Gonzalez, deputy chief of Public Safety. “For example, in 2019 we had a person who entered seven vacant rooms in resident life and removed toiletries, so that gave us five Clery statistics just based on that one incident.”

Similarly, though instances of motor vehicle theft were at zero in 2017 and 2018, this number jumped to seven in the 2019 school year. Gonzalez explained in a Feb. 10 email to The Panther that the majority of recorded vehicle theft incidents from 2019 were attributed to one event in which a group of minors drove unattended golf carts off campus. 

With the maintained closure of Chapman’s educational facilities as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, Gonzalez said crime has been less frequent on the main campus. Public Safety officers instead find themselves monitoring the residence halls more closely and working extra shifts since the campus closed in March.

“When the campus is active, we have tons of eyes and ears out there — people that can report suspicious activity to us,” Gonzalez said. “So, when the campus is inactive, we lose all of that and have to find a way to make up that ground.”