DPS offers engraving services

In an effort to share safety information with students, the Department of Public Safety will help students engrave their names on personal property on Saturday.

The Adopt-a-Hall program, a building initiative that pairs DPS officers with USC residential buildings to enhance the department’s relationship with students, will offer students living in the Annenberg House, Regal Trojan, Founders and other apartment buildings north of campus — engraving services this weekend.

“We started the program four years ago to work more closely with students to help build a relationship and bring information such as safety tips or programs that may assist them to become more aware,” DPS Lt. Terry Goddard, who also serves as an Adopt-a-Hall coordinator, wrote in an e-mail.

Officers will be located in the Annenberg Apartment Lobby from noon to 6 p.m., where students will be able to engrave property for identification purposes and the continuation of crime prevention efforts, Goddard said.

Students can engrave their names on a wide range of property: laptops, DVD players, bikes, iPods, televisions and video game consoles. The engraving process is like writing with a pen, Goddard said, and should not take much time.

Adopt-a-Hall officers offer engraving services at the beginning of each semester, usually when students have the most new property, Goddard said.

Although the program could help students retrieve property that might be lost or stolen, Goddard said that since the program began four years ago, crime rates have remained steady.

“There have been no increase in crimes,” Goddard said. “This [initiative] is something we at DPS have done for years as an education and prevention program.”

Goddard said that DPS has been working more closely with students to help build a relationship and provide information such as safety tips and programs that might make them more aware.

“It’s nice to have that relationship,” said Ailie Birchfield, a resident adviser in Regal Trojan. “In a large school with 16,000 people, people are bound to have the same stuff and [engraving] is an easy way to distinguish personal belongings with each other.”

Many students said they think this program will be helpful in protecting their property, but because there is no tracking device that goes along with the engraving, finding lost property could still be difficult.

“It definitely is beneficial for students, but it’s hard to track something if it is stolen,” said Erica Hovsepian, an undecided sophomore. “If a name is on [student’s property] they can easily claim it, but there’s so much theft that it is hard to retrieve something once it is stolen.”

Jillanna Bassan, a junior majoring in gender studies, said the program was a good effort to assist students in recovering stolen property.

“It is a really good idea because I always hear about students having their things stolen from them and there should be some sort of system to help these students,” Bassan said. “This seems like a good way of improving it.”