I've lived in South Bend since I was six years old, and I feel much safer here at Notre Dame than I do when I am in any other part of South Bend.
During my senior year of high school, a 17-year-old girl stabbed another girl to death because the two liked the same boy. My parents' house is in a fairly affluent neighborhood, but I've witnessed multiple drug busts going on down the street. My high school friends joke about wearing bullet-proof vests to school because guns are such a common occurrence. Thousands of animals are euthanized here every year because people don't care about their pets. People get murdered all the time.
And while all of this is going on, people are debating and rewriting an ordinance designed to combat the "real problem" of life in South Bend: Student parties.
I implore the Common Council to get some perspective and consider what they could accomplish if they stopped wasting time trying to curtail student partying and instead focused on the more serious problems plaguing South Bend. If the raucous parties of college students are the worst things that the South Bend Police Department has to deal with, then I'd say we live in a pretty good town. Unfortunately, teen partying is the least of South Bend's problems, and if the police are busy trying to break up student parties, there will be even less manpower to deal with the "actual" bad things that go on in South Bend.
Irena Zajickova
sophomore
Lewis Hall
Sept. 25
