A series of burglaries have taken place at Mulford Hall and the Foothill Residence Hall library over the past week.
Ten laptop computers were stolen from Foothill on Tuesday, according to a UCPD Crime Alert. Mulford Hall was also struck in two separate incidents, with 26 Dell CPU towers stolen on Wednesday and another 13 taken from the building on Sunday, according to the alert.
According to the alert, UCPD recommends taking the following steps to protect your property, discourage would-be criminals from committing burglaries and improve your chances of recovering stolen property:
• Keep portable devices, such as laptops, inside locked cabinets when not in use.
• Lock your desk, windows and office door when you leave your office, even if you are gone for a short time.
• Have all equipment locked down with an approved lock-down device.
• Keep an updated inventory of all office equipment.
• Identify equipment by engraving. To borrow an engraver please contact UCPD at (510) 643-6760.
Report any suspicious person or activity in your building to the police immediately. Dial 911 from any landline phone. From a cell phone on campus, dial (510) 642-3333. The following are examples of behaviors that could be considered suspicious:
• A person or persons you, or other employees, do not recognize going from office to office.
• A person or persons standing in a hallway for a long period of time.
• A person or persons waiting outside of the building near the time that the building will be closing.
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Adelyn Baxter is the news editor.
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There was a massive theft of relatively new computers at Berkeley High School a few years back. It turned out it was one of the security officers. The computers had been donated so the administration did not publicize the loss. This also sounds like an inside job.
Removing 26 Dell towers at a time is not easy. Did anyone notice large vans parked nearby?
How poor is the security in Mulford if they get hit once, and then again a couple of days later. Do they just leave doors unlocked over there?
ESPM (housed in Mulford) has no funds to protect equipment, we just have the same old glass-windowed doors. Anyone can enter the building and smash the office door-windows to gain access. It’s summer, not many people are around. But this happened during the semester too, mainly in nearby buildings. I’m a grad student, and since the University cannot protect my property, I work from home.
If computers must stay behind glass doors they can be made more difficult to steal by bolting them into the floor and monitoring them 24 hours a day using cheap webcams and remote uptime “pinging”.