Last weekend, three laptops, five movie projectors and a DVD player were stolen from King and residence halls.
First-year Marshall Duer-Balkind was the first to discover the missing DVD player and one of the missing projectors. On Sunday evening he walked into King 106 and pressed the play button on a control panel. When nothing happened, he realized that both the DVD player and the projector were gone.
“My reaction was, it had probably just been borrowed, just by some teacher or something,” he said.
He reported it missing anyway. By the following morning, it was clear that several more projectors had been stolen from rooms in King and Wright.
Director of Audiovisual Services Frederick Zwegat said that the thefts seemed carefully planned.
“The security cables and some of the connecting cables were cut,” he said. “Bolts were removed.”
“I’ve been here almost since 1987,” he added. “We’ve had a few minor thefts — TVs, VCRs — but this is by far the largest.”
The projectors and DVD player are only part of the story, however. That same weekend, three laptops were stolen from students’ rooms in Harkness and Barrows.
This year has seen an increase in computer thefts on campus. According to Director of Safety and Security Robert Jones, six computers, all of them laptops, have been reported stolen since the beginning of the school year — two from Harkness, and one each from Barrows, Mudd, and Hall Auditorium.
Assistant to the Director of Campus Information Technology Linda Iroff noted that the computer thefts have not been isolated.
“There have been three major clusters that I’ve noticed,” Iroff said. “There were several machines that were stolen just before Fall Break out of dorms. There were several machines stolen out of the library at the end of the semester. And then over the weekend, we had machines stolen out of Harkness and Barrows.”
Unlike the projectors that were stolen, the laptop heists do not seem to have involved very much effort.
“As far as I know, in every case the computers were not locked down, and in the dorms, the rooms were open,” she said.
Iroff added that she has been unable to track the missing computers on the campus network, leading her to suspect that they have been taken off-campus.
She does not believe that students committed the thefts.
“My speculation is that it’s someone outside the College, taking advantage of the fact that students do tend to be not as security conscious,” she said. “You just figure things are safe.”
Jones isn’t so sure.
“It’s a possibility [that students were behind some or all of the thefts],” Jones said. “I hope not, but it could be. Maybe someone with a drug problem — these things can move pretty fast on the street.”
Jones said he felt confident that the thieves would be caught.
“We have a lot of checking up to do,” he said. “We’ll check around pawn shops and other colleges, to see if incidents like this are occurring [elsewhere]. The police department has pretty good street information. We’ll search and ask questions.”
Meanwhile, students, faculty and administration are left to deal with the loss of $41,500 worth of machinery, not including the laptops.
“It’s certainly been a setback,” Zwegat said. “It’s been very disruptive to the classes. It’s a setback to our smart classroom program that we’ve been developing. Money that might have gone to new classrooms is now going to be diverted to getting replacement [equipment.]”
In the short run, however, students and teachers seemed able to adapt.
“I actually didn’t notice,” first-year Gus Visscher, who takes a class in one of the affected rooms, said. “Someone thought [the projector] had been taken down during the storm, but the teacher had gotten a letter that it had been stolen.”
“My sense talking to the other people in Cinema Studies is we were able to improvise pretty easily,” Professor of English Patrick Day said. “It was definitely a loss, but the classes kept going. It didn’t stop us.”
The College is taking steps to avoid similar thefts in the future.
“We’ll be having discussions with the Security office,” Zwegat said. “We’ll get some sort of security hardware devices to make the projectors more secure, and we’ll also be working with Security for prevention as well.”
As for keeping laptops safe, Iroff offered some advice to students.
“Keep a better eye on your equipment,” she said. “Lock your doors. Buy a security lock from the store.”