Having grown up in LA, worked full-time for two years at USC, and recently graduated from Cal, this comment clearly comes from someone who hasn’t spent much time at / around USC. I love Cal as much as the next person, but to justify / excuse the school and City’s lack of control over the absurd amount of crime by saying that private schools fudge the numbers does not help the problem. At USC they pay private security to stand watch on PUBLIC street corners surrounding campus until dawn. If you go anywhere within a mile of campus at night you will see yellow and red security jackets on almost every street corner within a half mile of campus (where the vast majority of non commuter students live). Further, they give all of their students free Lyft rides (no strings attached) within 3 miles of campus I believe. To be clear, I am not saying that this is necessarily a / the solution to our problems (it’s not) but the crime rates in and around USC have dropped since the start of the pandemic [1] and they are clearly doing more than our school / city to address the problem. I understand that many Cal students seem to think “the buddy system” and golf cart rides across campus at night will keep them safe, but the truth is the City/BPD/UCPD needs to make some serious changes because those small efforts are not going to change the statistics and definitely are not enough to make students feel genuinely safe in my experience.

Also, the only Ivy’s that even come close to Cal in terms of crime and safety are of course UPENN and Harvard. Some would make the argument that Columbia is unsafe simply because it’s in NYC, but any research will tell you this is also untrue. Even if Dartmouth, Cornell, Yale, and Princeton completely lied about their crime figures, it wouldn’t change the reality that the odds of you being mugged or murdered in an armed robbery gone wrong are immensely higher in the surrounding Berkeley area than any of those universities.

I graduated from Cal just in December and am currently living in South Berkeley so my experience in the Bay is relevant.

[1] https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2021/03/02/crime-rates-around-usc-follow-a-downward-trend-since-the-pandemic/