The disappearance and subsequent investigation of NIU student Antinette “Toni” Keller has prompted questions about the safety of NIU and DeKalb. After all, NIU must be dangerous with such high-profile incidents like the Keller case and the Feb. 14 shootings, right?

But it can be seen in Thursday’s cover story that crime on campus is not limited to NIU. Armed robberies, bomb threats, “peeping Toms;” they’ve happened at all of the universities the Northern Star included in the report.

When you break down the numbers, as the Northern Star has done, it’s clear that safety at NIU doesn’t stray from the average. According to the numbers in the Clery Annual Security Report alone, NIU is one of the safer campuses in Illinois when you compare the number of crimes to the number of people at the university.

Granted, numbers can be inflated and may not tell the whole story (and not all crimes are reported, either).

But the issue here isn’t statistics; no, the overriding problem seems to be perception.

As we’ve discussed in other editorials, NIU is in the midst of an image problem that it had no role in making; it is the victim of circumstances beyond its control.

You can throw lots of numbers and statistics at people, but that will never change the gut feeling of some people, and those can be very hard to change. So how do you convince someone who is certain that NIU is the most dangerous school ever that it really isn’t?

The only way to do is to take an honest stock of yourself at this university, and to think about it logically. NIU has an enrollment of over 22,000; of course there’s going to be crime.

But what about the deaths? After all, it is easy to gloss over the liquor law violations, the drug violations, even the robberies; it is a college campus.

But not every campus has a shooting like Feb. 14, 2008, and not every campus has their own Toni Keller case.

The fact is that those events could really have happened anywhere.

How could NIU have known that, when it enrolled Steven Kazmierciak in August of 2002, he would come back six years later and kill five Huskies before killing himself?

How could NIU have known that, when Toni Keller walked into the woods of Prairie Park that Thursday afternoon, it would be the last time they would see her?

NIU is a victim of circumstances beyond its control, as we stated earlier. So to blame the university, the administration, the police or whomever else for events that they could not control, and honestly, could have happened anywhere else, is unfair and wrong.

The circumstances we deal with in life are not always going to be good ones; bad things do happen to good people.

But there are ways to be prepared in case a dangerous scenario does become reality: Walk with somebody at night, know where the campus call boxes are, take self defense classes, lock your doors when you are home alone or are leaving your dorm room/apartment. Do what it takes for you to feel safe.

And these tips are not NIU-specific; they’re good habits to keep no matter where you are.

So to those who say NIU is an unsafe campus, we have to ask, “Compared to what?”