If you’ve been following The Denisonian for the past year or so, you will notice that there is something markedly different about our News section in this issue: the inclusion of crime reports documenting violations of law on campus. The Crime Report section is public information obtained from the Granville Police Department (GPD), and after much debate, our staff has decided that including the crime reports is crucial.
We stopped printing the crime report over a year ago because of anger that names of offenders were being included. We recognized that the inclusion of those names was both tasteless and insensitive, but the exclusion of crime information was just as bad. We have decided not to include the names of Denisonians in the crime reports, unless the case is of great public interest and/or scrutiny (e.g. Connor Baldwin). Our goal in resuscitating the Crime Report is simple: we want to aid in the transparency of events happening on campus. We believe that our readers and
everyone affiliated with the Denison and Granville communities has the inherent right to know what is occurring within those communities. We are hopeful that the reception and the dialogue of the Crime Report section will be productive.
Additionally, our peer publications, such as The Kenyon Collegian, publish their crime reports weekly, hopefully for the same reasons that we have decided to. Our intention is not to make the community fearful or to cast Denison in a negative light. Our goal, as journalists, has always
been to be objective.With this objectivism comes balance and reality. When we see shattered windows in our residence halls we deserve to know the outcomes of those cases. We deserve to celebrate all the great things that happen on this campus, but we deserve to be aware of all the disappointing things that occur as well.