Another hate crime occurred in Potomac Hall on Nov. 29, further adding to the abnormally high number of hate crimes on campus over the past year. 

According to Deputy Chief of Police Paul Dillon, UMBC police responded to the incident after receiving a call reporting an “act of intolerance” on the first floor study room of Potomac Hall. The incident involved a swastika being drawn on a whiteboard in one of the study rooms.

Dillon said that “[UMBC police] have seen an uptick of cases involving swastikas being drawn on a variety of surfaces on campus. We’ve been able to identify these cases but have not been able to link them.”

Incidents such as this one must be documented pursuant with the Clery Act. UMBC police must file an annual report on crime statistics and security policies. In this report, UMBC police define a hate crime as “a criminal offense that manifests evidence that the victim was intentionally selected because of the perpetrator’s bias against the victim.” In order to be a hate crime, the victim must be intentionally selected because of the victim’s actual or perceived race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, etc.

According to the UMBC daily crime report log, there has been a total of 16 reported hate crimes in 2017, 11 of which have occurred since August. This number almost doubles the number of hate crimes that occurred on campus in the last three years, as five hate crimes were reported in 2016, four in 2015, zero in 2014, and five in 2013.

Interestingly, the total number of reported crimes on campus has also gradually decreased each year, as there were 286 reported crimes in 2014, 283 reported crimes in 2015 and 243 reported crimes in 2016.

Since 2014, as the number of crimes decreased, the number of hate crimes increased on campus. Since there is a small sample size for the number of incidents involving hate crimes, it is difficult to judge the significance of the trends. It should be noted that these numbers include more than just crimes, as other emergencies that require medical attention are listed in the reports as well.

The number of hate crimes in the U.S. have had a similar pattern to UMBC over the past few years, although comparatively the changes of the rate of hate crimes in the U.S. have not been as severe.

According to the Uniform Crime Reporting program created by the FBI, between 2014 and 2016, the number of hate crime incidents has increased each year, with 5,479 hate crime incidents reported in 2014, 5,850 incidents reported in 2015, and 6,121 incidents reported in 2016. Interestingly, the number of hate crime incidents in 2013 was higher than 2014 and 2015, just like at UMBC, with 5,928 incidents reported that year.

Association of Old Crows APG-Susquehanna Chapter

Student Scholarship 2017-2018

$1,000 scholarship from the Association of Old Crows (AOC) APG-Susquehanna Chapter and a one year AOC membership from the National AOC. Winners will be recognized and awarded scholarships at the Chapter Distinguished Speaker and Scholarship Awards Luncheon scheduled for March 2018.

Requirements: Students must be undergraduate degree-seeking in the areas of engineering or computer sciences and be able to articulate a career interest related to the AOC professional mission in the fields of military communications, electronic warfare, electromagnetic spectrum management operations, cyber electromagnetic activities, and/or information operations. For example, a future career on a team that: develops systems that protect pilots from enemy anti-aircraft weapons and ground troops and civilians from IEDs or develops tools and programs to counter enemy cyber-attacks.

Apply: Please complete the attached application and return your completed application and application documents to Josh Abrams (josh.abrams@umbc.edu) either via email or in person to ITE 202. Please note that an essay and 2 letters of recommendation are required as part of the application.

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Thursday, December 21st and Saturday, December 30th.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Thursday, 12/21/2017 between 5pm and 8pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time): 

• The web hosting environments (virthost and jabba) will be partially unavailable (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)
• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)
• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched
• Expected to be unreachable from 5pm to 7pm
• All HFS (user) servers will be offline
• Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)
• RT will be offline between 5pm and 6pm

Saturday, 12/30/2017 between 10am and Noon(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality
• Wiki will be unavailable
• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thanks.

Tim Champ

Manager of Unix Infrastructure

UMBC DoIT