As a Leeds letting agency, we think the city is a wonderful place to call home. With plenty to do, great opportunities and a strong sense of community, Leeds has a lot to offer students and professionals alike.
However, every city has its dangers and keeping yourself safe is unfortunately something that people pretty much everywhere have to take into consideration, especially when on a night out.
One of the best things anyone can do to stay safe when on a night out is to stick with a trusted group of friends. To put it simply, people who prey on others look for the most vulnerable. For example, this is why you’re less likely to be attacked if you’re very physically intimidating. Due to this, there’s safety in numbers.
Whether someone is looking to try and take money or valuables from you by force, or be violent to you in general, having a larger group of people makes their attempts less likely to be successful, as well as meaning they are more likely to face legal retributive measures. In other words, a person trying to attack five people as opposed to one is more likely to be successfully defended against and be seen well enough to be identified or apprehended and arrested.
Essentially, this is a form of risk assessment by the criminal. They base who they target, among other factors in many cases, on who they think they can best get away with committing this crime to. The more people there are with you, the less likely you will seem like a viable target.
It’s also important to ensure that no one loses their group of friends and is left to go home by themselves. Most of us have experienced a situation similar to this. We all plan on going back together in a taxi but then someone gets lost in a club and ends up, often intoxicated, walking back home.
The most obvious thing to do here is to make sure that you don’t get separated from the group and, if that does happen, that everyone uses their phones to get back together as quickly as possible. As a last resort, make sure that you have enough money on you to get transport back home by yourself if all else fails.
However, when we say it’s important to stick together, we don’t simply mean as a group of friends – although we understand that’s often most practical. We don’t want anyone to be the victim of a crime when coming home at night.
The community of people who just want to go out, have a good night and get home safely are the vast, vast majority. So, when we say stick together, we don’t just mean as a friend group but as the law-abiding majority against a small minority who wants to take advantage of them by exploiting the vulnerable.
But practically, what can you do to improve this situation? Well, we understand that you can’t take care of a city’s worth of people on a night out.
However, if we all made a bit more effort to look out for one another – for example, by allowing someone who has found themselves alone to share transport home if they’re going the same way as your group, or walk back alongside you – then we can go some way to reducing the exploitation of vulnerable people and in general make our city and cities across the country a safer place to be on a night.