Residences may create focus groups on student safety
Focus groups may be created in residences this winter to get student feedback on residence security, Director of Housing and Hospitality Services Bruce Griffiths said.
Queen’s residences have looked at installing surveillance cameras in hallways and peepholes on room doors following the report of a sexual assault in Victoria Hall on March 27.
The concern has been raised that added security may not be what students living in residence are looking for, Griffiths said.
“We could set things up so between the front step and the bedroom there’d be five locked doors, but is that really how people want to live?” he asked. “We’ve found on the occasions we’ve added more locked doors, it just makes them more likely to be broken.”
The results of the focus group discussions will be presented to a residence committee in March and any resolutions will be adopted in April, he said.
Director of Residence Life Elizabeth Leal Conrad said if the committee decides to install security cameras, the most cost-effective solution would be to install them at the same time as other camera installations on campus.
“The best decision would be to link with what’s happening across campus, and that would take a bit more time.”
—Holly Tousignant
Conservative MP John Baird gives talk on campus
Conservative Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities John Baird made a surprise visit to Queen’s on Wednesday afternoon.
Baird spoke to a small crowd in the McLaughlin Room in the JDUC.
“He talked a lot about his time at Queen’s,” Queen’s Campus Conservatives member Ben Cox, ArtSci ’10, said.
Baird graduated from Queen’s in 1992 with a degree in political studies.
“I thought it was awesome,” Cox said. “It was more like a conversation with the audience than a speech.”
—Jamie Lincoln
Cyclist injured at William and Division
A car accident at William and Division streets on Tuesday left a female cyclist with minor injuries.
Kingston Police Const. Mike Menor said the accident report, which came in at 9:07 p.m., didn’t specify who was to blame for the collision between a car and a bicycle.
Both parties involved were Queen’s students.
The car also sustained minor damage.
“It’s in the report that the cyclist wasn’t wearing a helmet and didn’t have any lights on the bicycle in the dark,” Menor said. “It’s still under investigation.”
—Holly Tousignant
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s)-in-Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.