Staff at the Division of Campus Recreation have been taking steps to ensure the security of the locker rooms at the Intramural Physical Education Building and Campus Recreation Center East, commonly known as IMPE and CRCE.

At issue are the lockers known as digilocks, which are locked and opened by a four-digit passcode. The user enters a passcode of their choice from numbers one through six. The lockers’ primary purpose is convenience, allowing users who don’t bring a lock to the gym to secure their belongings.

However, digilocks are vulnerable to user carelessness, either by entering easy-to-guess passwords, such as 1-1-1-1, or by entering a password in plain sight for anyone to see, said Gary Miller, an associate director of the Division of Campus Recreation.

An original weakness of the lockers was that they were equipped with handles to open the door, Miller said. Thieves, however, instead used the handles for leverage to physically break the lock by pulling the door open.

“We did have a few where lockers that were broken into were just completely destroyed,” said Agata Nytko, student director at CRCE.

Miller said there was an increased number of thefts just prior to winter break involving an active, organized ring of at least five individuals who legitimately entered the building and exploited this weakness to break into lockers.

At one point while the ring was still at large, there were seven thefts at IMPE in one day, he said.

When the members of the group were arrested, Miller said there was a “dramatic decrease” in theft.

To prevent the recurrence of such an incident, the handles were removed and replaced with small knobs.

Ben Nugent, a junior in Engineering, feels safe using a digicode locker in the wake of those changes.

“That definitely brings a little bit of peace of mind,” Nugent said.

The staff’s use of a master key to open digilocks for users who forgot either their code or the location of their locker also created problems when staff would open the incorrect locker, Miller said.

This led the Division of Campus Recreation to replace some of the digilocks with padlock-compatible lockers.

“We don’t want to have access to your locker while you’re using it,” Miller said.

He hopes the changes will offer as many patrons as possible the use of a locker, while also providing an option between the convenience of the digilocks or the added security of a padlock.

“(Digilocks are) not as secure. Padlocks are not as convenient,” Miller said. “So you choose to trade off one for the other.”

Miller said the new wing of IMPE will also feature a choice of lock styles with a predominance of padlock lockers, but also with lockers that are opened through some sort of digital mechanism. The doors of the new lockers will also be vented rather than solid laminated wood in order to allow clothes to dry out.

Whatever lock they use, Miller said taking care of belongings is still the responsibility of patrons.

“Most of our thefts tend to be thefts of opportunity when someone wasn’t as careful as they could have been,” he said.

In fact, many security threats are not even caused by lockers at all.

“A lot of the time theft is not in the locker rooms, but at basketball,” said Kate Dibbin, a customer service assistant at IMPE.

Miller says he would encourage users to bring their own lock because there will always be security risks with digilocks.

“There is always the ability of someone standing near you to ‘steal your code,'” Miller said.