Students across Leeds are facing increasing problems in highly populated student areas.
Headingley, Hyde Park and Woodhouse are key locations for second- and third-year students.
As students have moved back to Leeds for the first term of university, crime rates have increased, with many cases of burglary and anti-social behavior.
Sophie Sutton, a student at Leeds Beckett University, had a car break in at Woodhouse Lane car park whilst it was parked there overnight.
Upon arrival at the car park, “the window had been smashed in and it was across all the back seat, it was the back left window. They had managed to pull the back seats down to try and get into the boot.”
Sophie said that the whole experience “made me feel stick to my stomach. It did make me really anxious that someone had been in my property.”
Companies such as Unipol have a feature on their web page dedicated to crime prevention, providing advice on how crimes can be avoided and how best to remain safe in built up residential areas.
A member of the Leeds Unipol team, said “we have a student support team. We also tie in closely with the university support team and even if it’s a follow up or if they’ve had an issue and it affected them, so they need someone to talk to, we have my colleague Jan Hardy who deals with that”.
Lucy Brunton-Douglas, a student resident in Headingley, experienced harassment in a local nail salon.
She said, “I was sat in the nail salon and this guy comes in, he’s really drunk and he’s saying, ‘can you do my nails?’ and they ask him to leave. He comes back and then he puts his hands on my shoulders and kept telling me I’m beautiful”.
For more information on what to do in these situations, visit Leeds | West Yorkshire Police
