Jeff Jensen, owner of Jensen Liquor, 620 W. Ninth St., gets a rush of customers using fake IDs this time of year. Shown above are dozens of IDs that he's confiscated from underage customers.

Overall, Lawrence is what many students think it is: a relatively peaceful, open-minded college town.

But some Kansas University students end up spending part of their college days in jail, and each school year brings an assortment of student-related crimes ranging from routine auto burglaries to sexual assaults and shootings.

KU’s student-housing parking lots have been especially problematic the past two years. A series of violent crimes – including a carjacking at Gertrude Sellards Pearson/Corbin and a student held at knifepoint by a masked man on Daisy Hill – have caused campus police to plan for installing surveillance cameras in the lots.

Also, Lawrence Police are still trying to solve two armed rapes of KU students during the 2004-2005 school year that appear to be related. In both cases, the suspect entered the victims’ off-campus dwellings early in the morning armed with a handgun, then escaped without being identified.

One of the main pieces of advice police give to students is to simply lock their doors and windows. Since 2003, there have been a series of reports of intruders entering unlocked homes – most recently in June, when a naked, 20-year-old Hutchinson man was arrested for entering a Lawrence woman’s home and kissing her as she lay in bed.

Here’s some advice for KU students who want to keep from being victimized and avoid spending part of their college career behind bars.

¢ Avoid walking alone at night. There have been at least two unsolved sexual assaults since fall 2003 against young women who were walking in the Oread neighborhood.

¢ Don’t leave valuables unsecured.

“I think students need to be aware that they are always targets of theft, be that in the form of electronic theft, identity theft or just personal property theft,” said Ralph Oliver, chief of the KU Public Safety Office. “The category of students who are most victimized are freshmen. That’s because they’re new and tend to be open and have not quite gotten into the swing of how the university works.”

The parking lots of some of Lawrence’s biggest student apartment complexes are a virtual shopping mall for auto thieves. Car stereos, CDs, speaker boxes, amplifiers and subwoofers are among the items that are stolen the most.

¢ If you use a fake ID, be prepared to pay the consequences. Bouncers, police and clerks are especially alert at the beginning of the school year.

Being a minor in possession of alcohol – the dreaded “MIP” – carries a mandatory $300 fine, plus a suspended driver’s license for 30 days.

If people want to enter a diversion program to keep the offense off their record, they can pay $300 plus $85 for a day-long alcohol education course on a Saturday.

“It ruins their Saturday,” city prosecutor Jerry Little said.

¢ If you get a ticket, deal with it.

“The biggest problem we see with students who maybe get a speeding ticket or run a red light is that they don’t do anything about it,” Little said. “They think nothing’s going to happen. Next thing they know, their license is suspended and they get stopped driving on a suspended license, and they’re facing jail time. … It just snowballs.”