Grego said many students come to Penn State with the idea that State College is a safe area, and even though he agrees with this assumption, he said people need to take precautions.
"We are tagged with the term 'Happy Valley'," Grego said. "We need to lock our apartments. Most people going into these apartments, they're doing it because the doors and windows are unlocked. It's basically a crime of opportunity."
Grego said that perpetrators aren't going to attempt to break into an apartment if it is locked.
Grego stressed the importance of lighting in students' apartments and how it could ward off potential predators.
"If you can light up your apartment, even if you're not there, it will look like someone is there," he said.
Grego talked about the importance of walking at night in lighted areas.
He said they have been working with student groups to get feedback as to where they want more lighting. He said they're looking to get more streetlights where it is really dark.
"What we usually tell students, especially female students, is to walk with someone else," he said. Much of the discussion was based on the recent sexual assaults and potential methods of prevention such as a 24-hour lock down of the residence halls.
Andrews said the feedback she has received from students has been mainly disapproval of the lock down.
Andrews added that a major issue students need to realize is that "piggybacking" is occurring, which means non-residents follow residents into the building and the residents either let it happen or are ignorant to the situation.
Some students and senators agreed that the recent problems with the sexual assaults in residence halls were that the perpetrator lived in the buildings.
Andrews said 90 percent of crimes have to do with doors not being locked.
"You need to be as aware as you can in your environment. We assume we know the other 900 people living in the building," she said.
Students need to look more closely at their peers that live in their building and expect for some people not to be good, Andrews said.
"It's sad to think about society that way, but we need to be realistic," she added.
Andrews said they have increased the amount of on-duty officers that walk through the dorms.
"I don't want to get into the situation where police officers are everywhere," Andrews said.
One senator brought up the idea of having a sign-in station for visitors of residents to officially register their visit to the dorm. Andrews said the problem with that would be the many doors to each residence hall.
"The way our facilities are set up, they weren't designed for that," she said.
Some students brought up recent hate crimes that have been committed on and off campus.
Grego said, "As a police officer, we treat a crime as a crime. We don't show any leniency to anyone — we just don't do that."
Benjamin Gerald (senior-architectural engineering) said he felt the recent hate crimes aren't taken seriously.
"It's not seen by the public as a crime," Gerald said.
Grego added that if a crime happens and they believe it is a hate crime, they'd put it in newspapers to get the word out.
"We don't want to hide it, we're not going to sweep it under the rug," he said.
Another issue discussed was the riots that happened during two of the past annual Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts.
"How can we keep it from occurring again?" Grego asked.
"I don't want to see every Arts Festival a riot happen. We're giving State College a bad name. We're giving ourselves a bad name," he added.
Students wanted to know how the police could prevent the riots.
"We could easily call in the state police and have an officer every 50 feet down the street — we don't want to have to do that," Grego said.
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