I walked a few steps behind the skirted student down the dark street behind the hallowed halls of UVa on my way to a meeting between university and city police and students about safety, attention and folks that rob you in the night.

She wasn’t thinking about who was behind her. She was zooming with tunes in her iPoded ears with a laptop backpacked and books under arms and couldn’t hear the click of my boot heels three yards away.

That’s not necessarily good. It seems some of us locals, probably the kind of folks who don’t read dailyprogress.com or the hard-copy version very often, are making money off UVa students at the points of guns, knives and fists. There’ve been between a half and a dozen assaults and stick-ups in the past 90 days according to police, all victims students and all perps apparently locals.

There are ways to avoid it, cops said. Watch your back. Watch your front. Get other people to help watch your back while you watch theirs or get a ride home. Students had some good ideas, too. Put a pedestrian crossing over the railroad tracks that most students cross to get to their off-grounds apartments from an evening of fellowship on the Corner. That’s not likely to happen, given the fastidious nature of railroads, governments and funding, so the students will just have to go around and stay off the tracks.

NOTE: Police are ticketing track crossers crossing tracks at non-crossing points for trespassing at the railroad’s request.

So be careful out there. Don’t drink too much, ‘cause crooks like you intoxicated. Don’t take shortcuts through dark places and keep an eye out for trouble, even as you unlock your apartment door.

It’s not a jungle out there, but there are a lot of animals and they will bite.