Crime statistics being released by colleges are misleading

Columbus Dispatch/ Student Press Law Center

The crime statistics being released by colleges nationwide Wednesday are so misleading that they give students and parents a false sense of security.

Even the U.S. Department of Education official who oversees compliance with a federal law requiring that the statistics be posted Oct. 1 each year admits that they are inaccurate. Jim Moore said that a vast majority of schools comply with the law but some purposely underreport crimes to protect their images; others have made honest mistakes in attempting to comply.

In addition, weaknesses in the law allow for thousands of off-campus crimes involving students to go unreported, and the Education Department does little to monitor or enforce compliance with the law — even when colleges report numbers that seem questionable.

The law known as the Clery Act was enacted in 1991 to alert students to dangers on campus, but it often fails at its core mission, a joint investigation by The Dispatch and the Student Press Law Center found.

Colleges such as Urbana University in Ohio have failed at meeting the most-basic requirements of the law: accurately counting and reporting the number of crimes that happen on or near campus each year.

Other colleges across the U.S. have drawn boundaries around their campuses to exclude off-campus housing where the majority of their students live — as the law allows. And some, including Ohio State University, often choose not to alert students when violent crimes happen in those areas.

Three days after The Dispatch asked about the lack of alerts, Ohio State issued two alerts during the weekend, including the first OSU alert for a possible off-campus sexual assault in more than three years. University officials said yesterday that the timing was a coincidence.

College officials such as those from the University of Toledo said they didn’t do enough for many years to create victim-friendly cultures that encourage students to report crimes to police or campus officials.

Crime statistics are taking on even more importance as U.S. News & World Report and other college-ranking publications use them to measure safety.

“We encourage people to use the Clery Act as a starting point,” Moore said. “We think the data is useful to give a long view.”

But its intent — inspired by the slaying of Lehigh University freshman Jeanne Clery, who was unaware of a rash of burglaries in her dorm in 1986 before to her death — was to create a one-stop gauge of campus safety.

The Dispatch and the Student Press Law Center analyzed 12 years of Clery Act crime statistics involving nearly 1,800 schools with on-campus housing and found that:

Nearly 3 percent have reported that there never has been a crime of violence on their campuses. Not a single homicide, robbery, serious physical assault or sexual assault.

Nearly 16 percent reported that there has never been a physical altercation that could have resulted in serious harm.

Nearly a fifth reported that there has never been a sexual assault, including Urbana University, northwest of Columbus, where a student told police in 2012 that she was gang-raped in a dorm room.

In any year, at least half of the colleges report zero sexual assaults. About two-thirds report zero serious physical assaults.

Bowling Green State University, for example, said that it had no serious physical assaults on campus in 2011 and 2012, even though its student-disciplinary board punished about 60 students for physical assault. Bowling Green leaders said that even a shoving match is considered “physical abuse” by the code of conduct, but that attacks rarely result in serious injury.

Experts on crime, and even the Education Department’s Moore, say that those scenarios seem unrealistic. “If you have a housing unit, it would be hard to believe that over any period of time, any number of years, you could actually be so lucky as to not have any sex crimes,” Moore said.

But those in charge of enforcing the law rarely check accuracy of the colleges’ numbers.

The lack of oversight for colleges is troubling to Ohio Auditor Dave Yost, who, in response to the Dispatch/SPLC investigation, is considering a program here that models programs in New York, Texas and California, where investigators audit Clery Act compliance among the schools in their states.

Last year’s reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act resulted in the first major overhaul of Clery since the law was enacted. The changes require colleges to report statistics on dating and domestic violence and stalking.

“The intent behind Clery was good. The execution often stinks,” said Andrea Goldblum of Columbus, a consultant with the Margolis Healy firm and former Clery coordinator at Ohio State. “It’s actually really hard to comply with Clery.”

It takes only one unreported incident for a college to violate the law.

At Urbana University, a female student reported that she had been gang-raped by three male students in March 2012. A nine-page report from the Urbana city police department details the sexual assault that happened in a dorm room.

After a three-month investigation, no criminal charges were filed, partly because of a reluctant victim. Still, the school was required to log the incident as a sexual assault.

Urbana University, which was acquired by Franklin University in April, reported zero sexual assaults in 2012 — just as it had done the previous 11 years.

After The Dispatch and SPLC contacted the university about not reporting the case, school officials said it was an oversight and that they will review city police and campus records to ensure that nothing else has been missed.