Few takers for Dal's Tiger Patrol escorts

By: Erin Fitzgerald
Date: November 12, 2007

Amanda Kuntze has worked 18 shifts for the Dalhousie Tiger Foot Patrol since the beginning of the school year.

It’s not until tonight, Sept. 26, that she receives her first call to walk a student home.

The third-year sociology student chalks up the lack of requests to poor advertising.

“We only have really outdated posters up and they are only in the Tupper Medical Building and first-year residences,” she says. “You never really see them on the rest of campus.”

Tonight, Kuntze and her partner, first-year science student Justin Doucette, will patrol the campus from 6 p.m. to 12:30 a.m., keeping an eye out for suspicious behaviour and walking students across campus.

Patrollers carry radios and receive calls from the main security desk in the Marion McCain Building when a student wants to be picked up. Kuntze is in her third year as a patroller; Doucette is working his third shift.

Founded in the fall of 1991 the Tiger Patrol now employs 40 students and is funded by the Dalhousie Student Union. The organization offers both a walk-home service, for students living on campus, and a van service for those living off-campus.

While on patrol, Kuntze and Doucette walk down LeMarchant Street at about 9 p.m. The lights on the soccer field make the turf shine neon green, creating an eerie glow in the distance.

The quad – the area in the centre of the campus – proves to be equally uninviting. It’s dark everywhere except for slivers of light creeping from adjacent buildings.

Doucette says these aren’t the scariest places on campus. The path between the
Killam Library and Howe Hall has earned the nickname “rape valley” although there is no record of a rape having taken place here.

“It’s so dark and you have to walk down a big dip and there are lots of trees, anyone could jump out at you,” Doucette explains.

First-year arts student Colleen Davitsky is the first person Kuntze will walk home this year.

“I felt a lot safer being walked home tonight, especially walking through creepy, dark places,” says Davitsky, who saw an advertisement for the foot patrol in her residence.


While there are about 2,000 first-year students at Dalhousie, the foot patrol might get one call a night at most. It is usually from a woman, Kuntze says. She has only walked home one man in her three years.

Doucette understands why. “Being a guy, I wouldn’t want to admit I used it,” he says. “You are walking around with these two people with big, bright yellow coats on. It’s an awkward situation.”

Kuntze says the service received an increase in calls last year after a girl was assaulted near the Tupper Building in the early evening. Security sent out a warning note to all students and requests for walks across campus increased for about a month, she says.

The co-ordinator of Tiger Patrol, fourth-year commerce student Doyle Bond, says he isn’t bothered by the low demand. The driving force behind the foot patrol is the safety-in- numbers theory.

“Even if you walk one person home and prevent them from getting assaulted,” he says “it’s worth it.”