Daily O'Collegian, OK
10-02-07
University releases annual crime stats
By Jaclyn Cosgrove
Senior Staff Writer
Victims of six sexual offenses that occurred near campus won’t find their cases
included in OSU’s annual campus crime report released Monday.
The campus crime report is part of the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus
Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act. Effective Sept. 1, 1991, the act
requires public and private colleges and universities that participate in federal
student aid programs to disclose campus crime information.
It is named in memory of 19-year-old Lehigh University freshman Jeanne Ann
Clery, who was assaulted and murdered while asleep in her residence hall room
in April 1986, according to the Web site of Security on Campus, a Clery Act
watchdog organization that the Clery family founded.
Each campus security authority or campus police department must include in its
Clery Report crimes that occur on campus and also on noncampus property and
public property. An institution must make a reasonable, good faith effort to obtain
the required statistics and may rely on the information a local or state police
agency supplies, according to the act.
Whether a crime, such as a sexual offense, is included in a campus’ Clery Act
report depends on the location of the incident, said Capt. Richard Atkins, one of
the OSU police administrators who compiles OSU’s Clery Act data.
“Say that the girl was abducted from the sidewalk and drug into the car or into the
next block, the act actually started on that sidewalk and we would include it,”
Atkins said. “If it’s on one of our streets, our public property streets, we would
include it. But if it [occurred] in the street next to the noncampus, off away from
campus, we would not include it.”
Lt. Mark Shearer, another OSU Police administrator who compiles Clery Act
data, said he thought more information about off-campus crimes, such as those
that occur in off-campus student housing, could be incorporated into the Clery
Act.
Because of the act’s wording, campus police departments do not have to include
information about an apartment complex with a high crime rate next to fraternity
XYZ, Shearer said.
How a campus police department would report crimes occurring on noncampus
and public property may vary depending on interpretation of the law, Shearer
said.
Lt. Bruce Chan, a University of Oklahoma Police Department public information
officer, said the person compiling OU’s Clery Act data requests specific
addresses of greek houses and properties that fit the “public property” and
“noncampus” definitions from the Norman Police Department.
A “noncampus building or property” includes any building or property that a
student organization that the institution recognizes owns or operates, and any
building or property, other than branch campuses, that an institution of higher
education owns or controls and is used in direct support of the institution’s
educational purposes, is used by students, and is not within the same reasonable
contiguous geographic area of the institution, according to the U.S. Department
of Education’s definition within the act.
A “public property” is all public property within the same reasonably contiguous
geographic area of the institution, such as a sidewalk, a street, other
thoroughfare, or parking facility, and is adjacent to a building the institution owns
or controls if the building is used in direct support of the institution’s educational
purposes, according to the U.S. Department of Education definition within the
act.
Chan said if, for example, Jones Street ran along one of the university’s borders,
the department would report crimes that occurred along the sidewalk that ran
along the campus side of Jones Street.
The department would not ask for anything that happened inside the private
businesses or private houses on the other side of Jones Street because public
property by definition is not going to include those private businesses or those
private residences, Chan said.
“I can’t speak for a city police department but generally speaking you report
crimes from an address,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to query how many crimes
happened on the sidewalk as opposed to how many crimes happened inside a
residence at a specific [address]. Say the address is 123 Jones St. You would
have to look at that and say ‘Was this a rape or burglary or larceny that
happened inside 123 Jones St. or was that something that happened outside in
public property in front of 123 Jones St.?” Chan said.
Capt. Gene Deisinger, commander of special operations for Iowa State
University, said the area around campus for which the Iowa State University
Police Department reports is not a consistent distance around because of the
university property layout.
With an enrollment of about 25,462 students, Iowa State University has about
2,000 more students than OSU. It is also a land-grant institution, according to the
university’s Web site.
“It gets all the more complicated the more disconnected elements of campus are
to each other,” Deisinger said. “For example, at Iowa State University, like many
other institutions, we have a core part of campus that is pretty contiguous. Then
we have a residential area that is separate from the campus by approximately
four blocks of the city. Then we have a research area that is about six blocks
west from campus.”
S. Daniel Carter, the senior vice president of Security on Campus, Inc., said no
campus is the same, and therefore flexibility is built into the definitions with
respect to what is non-campus and what is campus.
“But there are, however, clear guidelines for how far to report ‘public property’
crime,” Carter said in an e-mail. “All schools must report to the end of the
sidewalk across the street from the campus and no further. Or for large public
areas that abut the campus they should report a one-mile radius into the park or
other area.”
The U.S. Department of Education, the agency charged with enforcement of the
Clery Act, can fine violators up to $27,500, according to Security on Campus
Web site.
Security On Campus, Inc. is a non-profit organization whose mission is to
prevent violence, substance abuse and other crimes in college and university
campus communities across the United States, and to assist the victims of these
crimes, according to its Web site.
Carter said an institution violates of the Clery Act for misreporting their statistics,
either through under or over reporting.
Under the Clery Act, only significant misrepresentations warrant a fine and to
date no institution has ever been fined for overreporting, although it is technically
possible, Carter said.
“Overreporting could significantly misrepresent an institution’s crime statistics if it
reported so much extraneous statistics that it masked the true scope of crime
occurring in the mandated reporting areas,” Carter said.
Shearer said having penalties for overreporting keeps a university police
department from picking a random high number and reporting it as fact.
“Clery is trying to get universities to report exactly what is taking place,” Shearer
said. “…I believe this is critical information people need to have.”