Reporting a Crime to Public Safety: A How-To Guide

Most of this information was taken from the new DePaul Public Safety Web site, http://publicsafety.depaul.edu/index.asp

The main way to report a crime on any of DePaul's campuses is to call, which will put you in touch with Public Safety officers that can help you. The Public Safety offices are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Of course, you can also call 911 to report emergencies.

So, your first step would be to call. The number you call depends on where you are.

Here are the main numbers for the Public Safety departments:

Lincoln Park: (773)325-7777
Loop: (312) 362-8400
Oak Forest: (708) 614-4807
Grayslake: (847) 665-4000

The Naperville, O'Hare and Rolling Meadows campuses only have non-emergency numbers listed for their police and fire departments. Why a need for the police or fire department would not be an emergency, I have no idea.

Anyways, those numbers are:

Naperville: (630) 420-6666 (police) and (630) 420-6142 (fire)
Rolling Meadows: (847) 255-2416 (police) and (847)397-3352 (fire)
O'Hare: (847) 391-5400 (police) and (847) 391-5333 (fire)

If you don't have a cell phone with you when a crime occurs, you can also run to one of the blue emergency light stations around campus - hitting the button on those lights connects you to the office, and from there, an officer will communicate by phone.

After you've reached an officer, explain where you are and what's happening, and an officer or member of the Chicago Police department will be dispatched to help you. Last year, the record for a Public Safety officer reaching the scene of a crime was "in under five minutes," a figure Bob Wachowski gave in an interview that I conducted for The DePaulia last year.