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Posted on Sun, Jan. 15, 2006

Philadelphia Inquirer 

Front Page

On campus, creating an illusion by crime data

Many schools paint a misleading picture by how they report crime - or
fail to.

By Patrick Kerkstra

Inquirer Staff Writer

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/13627375.htm

 

 

For the last four years, West Chester University has been all but free
of serious crime.

 

At least that's what the school told the federal government, and what it
assured students and parents on its Web site.

Last month, though, as an Inquirer examination of campus police logs
began turning up multiple sexual assaults and burglaries, the university
revised the low crime figures it had filed with the U.S. Department of
Education.

A single sexual assault in all of 2003 and 2004 morphed into 14 attacks,
including 10 in residence halls. Burglaries in those years shot from two
to 45.

Administrators blamed the disparities on classification errors - crimes
mislabeled as less serious, nonreportable offenses - and not on any
cooking of the books.

Yet no matter what created the gap between the official reports and
reality at West Chester, the result for its 12,800 students, their
parents and legions of prospects was an illusory picture of a campus
almost immune to significant crime.

"If things are happening on campus, students want to know about it so
they can protect themselves," said Allison Stull, editor of the student
newspaper, the Quad. "How can we do that if they're not telling us?"

West Chester is hardly the only school to submit inaccurate data in
violation of federal law. Named after Jeanne Ann Clery, a Lehigh
University freshman who was raped and murdered in her dorm room by
another student in April 1986, the Clery Act requires colleges and
universities to count and annually report crimes such as murder,
aggravated assault and robbery that occur on or near campus.

However, "only about a third do so in a way fully consistent with
federal laws" enacted in 1990, according to a U.S. Justice Department
study released last month.

Philadelphia-area schools have been well-represented in the ranks of
offenders, accounting for three of at least 15 investigations by the
government into reporting irregularities in the last decade. One of the
latest is La Salle University, where the federal probe was triggered in
2004 by claims that basketball coaches discouraged a female student from
reporting an alleged rape by a player.

The La Salle review isn't finished. But nearly every other targeted
school - including the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and the
College of New Jersey in Ewing in 2000 - was found not to be complying
with the Clery Act. Although violators can be fined up to $27,500, the
more common penalty has been bruising publicity.

Getting caught turned Penn and TCNJ into national exemplars of campus
crime reporting. But strained federal resources means that the vast
majority of higher-education institutions get minimal scrutiny. Indeed,
on the Web site where it posts the Clery numbers, the Education
Department warns that it "cannot vouch for [their] accuracy."

Often, the crime statistics found there are so low as to defy common
sense.

Consider the region's seven community colleges, two of which are in
downtown Philadelphia and Camden. Attended by a total of 78,000
students, the schools submitted Clery figures for 2004 that, when added
up, included just one sexual assault, two aggravated assaults, and four
robberies.

Community College of Philadelphia, for one, admitted filing incomplete
reports. The Clery Act requires schools to make a "good-faith effort" to
count crimes that occur on the streets and sidewalks immediately
bordering the campus, even if the incidents were handled only by
municipal police.

"For the past three years I did not get any data from the [Philadelphia]
police - I am told that information is unavailable," Randy Merced,
manager of Community College of Philadelphia security, wrote in an
e-mail response to The Inquirer.

Merced's counterparts at other Philadelphia colleges said city police
readily share crime data for Clery purposes.

Judging from the figures it has been sending to Washington, Drexel
University is another anomalous island of relative safety in the inner
city.

Penn, its next-door neighbor in West Philadelphia, included in its 2004
report eight sexual assaults, nine aggravated assaults, 65 robberies and
49 burglaries in a student population of 23,300. Drexel, with nearly
18,000 students, counted 20 aggravated assaults but far fewer sexual
assaults (1), robberies (2) and burglaries (27).

Bernard Golloti, Drexel's vice president for public safety, said in an
interview that criminals are more active in the blocks immediately south
and west of his campus, where Penn lies.

But the differences also reflect the two schools' varied takes on the
spirit of the Clery Act. Penn now reports all crime that occurs in its
security force's patrol area, extending a couple of blocks beyond the
official campus lines - well more than the law demands. Temple
University does likewise.

"We like to give students and parents as much information as possible,"
said Maureen Rush, Penn's vice president for public safety. "A robbery a
block off campus is still of interest to the campus community."

Drexel hews to far tighter reporting boundaries. In campus police logs
from 2004, The Inquirer found eight robberies of at least 10 students
within two blocks of the campus. None turned up in the Clery filings.

In one of them, a Drexel student was accosted by an assailant at 30th
and Market Streets, just outside the school's mandatory reporting area.
He was chased a block into the Clery zone, beaten and robbed of $5.

Asked about that attack, plus another in the log that appeared to have
happened on a sidewalk along the campus, Golloti said he would assign an
investigator.

Last week, both incidents were added to Drexel's 2004 tally of robberies
and filed to Washington.

West Chester's review led to the relabeling of nearly 60 crimes.

"The numbers were incorrect," said university spokesman Stephen Bell,
"so we changed them."

However, even the newly revised figures for 2004 may be wrong, for they
do not include crimes that occurred on the streets and sidewalks rimming
the campus. As in the case of PCC, West Chester University security
officials said they relied on the borough police to supply data for that
year, but received last year's figures instead.

While acknowledging that "we've misclassified numbers, and that's an
opportunity for us to have a black eye," West Chester University Police
Lt. Michael D. Vining defended his department's record.

"When you look at the way security is provided on campus, the numbers
are important," he said. "But it's not just in the numbers."

Student leaders generally agreed that campus police do a good job. Many
expressed shock, nonetheless, at learning the crime statistics had been
so wrong.

"I never would expect them to lie to me about something like that," said
Louisa Correal, a junior and executive director of the student-run
Residence Hall Association. "It damages the trust I have in the school."

At the university Women's Center, which counsels sexual-assault victims,
director Robin Garrett said the campus police would not have knowingly
made incorrect reports.

"It isn't right that this happened and obviously there was laxity, if
nothing else," she said, but added that she doubted "it was anything but
a mistake."

Among campus-safety watchdogs, though, skepticism over "mistakes" runs
high. Image-sensitive schools, they contend, aren't eager to be
accurate.

"Acknowledging that crime happens in the ivory tower is really tough for
them," said Catherine Bath, executive director of Security on Campus, a
King of Prussia advocacy group founded by the parents of Jeanne Ann
Clery.

"Really low numbers" are "a red flag," Bath said. "When you see zero or
one sexual assaults for a school of 12,000, that school has what we call
'a culture of silence.' "

Colleges that have gotten it wrong, and gotten caught, frequently blame
their errors on the Clery Act's complex reporting rules. They fill a
216-page Education Department manual and are confusing enough to have
spawned a cottage industry of compliance consultants.

Take, for instance, a school bordered by a park. Must crimes that occur
there be reported? The guidebook answers: No, if the park is gated; yes,
if it is not gated; and sometimes, if it is occasionally gated.

A far more common source of complaint is the way the Clery Act
classifies campus crimes. Its broad categories do not jibe with those of
states such as Pennsylvania, which also require colleges to report
crimes. In the case of West Chester, school officials say, incidents got
lost in the translation.

Crafted for a college culture, in which crimes often occur by people
under the influence of alcohol and date-rape drugs, the Clery Act
gathers all sex offenses except statutory rape and incest under a single
heading, "forcible sexual offenses."

In their state filings, however, colleges have a choice of two
categories for sex crimes: "rape," defined as forcible carnal knowledge
of a woman, and "sex offenses," which includes everything else. West
Chester had improperly omitted the latter from its Clery reports.

Another common misclassification occurs when student property is stolen
from dorm rooms. The Clery Act calls that "burglary" until the thief
proves to be a roommate or invited guest. Many schools - including
Temple and Kutztown University - have labeled it as "theft," which need
not be reported to the feds.

In the case of Kutztown, the Education Department noticed, and
university police corrected the error in 2003. Temple police said they
made the same switch last year.

"Reporting is slowly getting better," said Bath, of Security On Campus.
"Most schools still don't do it right, but more do every year."

For their commitment to full disclosure, institutions such as Penn can
appear downright dangerous compared with schools that are less
forthcoming. Some become targets of negative media reports, such as an
ABC News Primetime show in November that lambasted schools with
relatively high crime rates.

College officials are acutely aware that the "perception" of a campus
less safe than its competitors can seriously damage a university's
"brand," said Rush, Penn's security chief.

Nonetheless, when worried parents and students call, Rush said, "I tell
them we give them the full picture, that we believe honesty is the best
medicine."

 

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Contact staff writer Patrick Kerkstra at 610-313-8111 or
.