Electric scooters litter city streets. Courtesy | Pixabay
Campus Security is now encouraging students to register scooters with the school as more students zip to classes on two wheels.
Security noticed an uptick in the number of scooters and expanded its voluntary bike registration program to provide students with options for recovering missing scooters, according to Director of Security John Wilmer.
“We have that as an option, and that is just for us to help you,” Wilmer said. “No one records their information. You have a TV, a VCR, DVD player, Blu-Ray, and we never record our serial numbers off that.”
Registration solves this problem, making it simpler to recover missing property, according to Wilmer.
“We can check our lost and found if it’s been reported to us, or I can just take the numbers from them, look it up in the system, say those belong to our students, and then we can get them back to the owners,” Wilmer said.
Security operates the program as a free and voluntary service to students, Wilmer claimed.
“Our policy isn’t that you must register,” Wilmer said. “It’s an option you have free of charge. By registering, we’re just going to record your serial number, make, and model. Then we provide them with a small sticker. That way, if a scooter is found with or without a sticker, security can check their database to find the rightful owner.”
Wilmer noted that voluntary registration has already helped many students recover missing bicycles, sometimes even before they were reported missing. In one case Wilmer recalled, the City of Hillsdale Police Department worked with security to return registered property.
“In the last couple years, I did have an incident where they had a bicycle,” Wilmer said. “They gave me the sticker. We looked it up, and sure enough, it was one of our bikes. It had not been officially reported stolen, but we had it.”
Now, the program opens this option to scooters as well. Resident Life sent an email earlier this month stating that all scooters were required to be registered with the school, but a revised policy was sent out on Sept.12. Now, the college strongly encourages all scooters to be registered with the school for security reasons, according to Dean of Men Aaron Petersen.
“Now that I know there’s no cost, that’s definitely something I’ll look at,” sophomore Shae Ruddy said. “I just felt like there was no need for it. I didn’t know there was a benefit to me.”
