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The Duke University Police Department would like to extend our greetings to you.
The nationwide problem of crime points to the importance of having confidence in one's home and workplace safety. We are pleased to provide you via our World Wide Web Site a variety of information about campus safety at Duke. We hope it will be helpful and will remind all of us to make use of the considerable resources Duke offers to help keep faculty, staff, and students safe.
You will note that our web page includes a detailed accounting of crime statistics and criminal incidents at Duke. A few points may be useful in helping you understand these statistics. With a work force of over 30,000, a student body of some 15,000, and an estimated 2 million visitors per year, Duke is a large and complex institution. Our department has responsibility not only for the main campus, but also for the state's largest medical facility and for the largest private research forest in the nation. Our crime statistics and logs therefore include incidents that occurred not just on the main academic campus or in the medical center, but in the Duke Forest miles from the main campus, and at other locations owned or controlled by the university.
We hope these facts can help you understand why it is difficult to make useful comparisons of statistics between vastly different institutions -- be they other college campuses or medical centers.
Please be assured that we take the issue of campus safety extremely seriously, and that Duke is determined to continue its efforts to ensure that our campus remains safe. To do so, of course, requires not just the efforts of the Police Department, but the cooperation and understanding of every member of the Duke community. Please do your part to help protect yourself and others.
If you have any concerns or suggestions about security or law enforcement at Duke, please feel free to telephone us at 684-6571.