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>From the issue dated January 30, 2009  


In Campus-Crime Reports, There's Little Safety in the Numbers


By SARA LIPKA

Numbers suggest certainty, and when it comes to campus crime, everybody
wants answers. That's what the Clery Act set out to reveal: How many
rapes, burglaries, assaults? When? Where? Enacted nearly two decades
ago, the federal law requires colleges to send the government lengthy
reports each year, detailing their policies and tallying their total
crimes.

But do statistics keep students safe? As campus security has become a
national fixation, some scholars of the Clery Act - and officials who
must comply with it daily - challenge the wisdom of producing timeand
labor-intensive reports of dubious value. And they puzzle over a
paradox: The law requires them to publish the numbers, but students and
their families don't seem to read them.

As a consumer-protection statute, the Clery Act has faltered. Its
crime-reporting requirements were intended to inform families, to change
students' behavior, and to keep them safe. But research on the use of
the reports shows that very few students look - and even those who seek
solid information are out of luck. Did the University of New Orleans
really have just one aggravated assault in 2007, while nearby Tulane
University, with slightly fewer students, had 24? Did the University of
California at Davis have almost as many forcible-sex offenses as the
system's nine other campuses combined? Did New York University really
see burglaries jump 771 percent in a single year?

Concerns that colleges would misinterpret the law's regulations or
misrepresent their crime figures arose early on, and they linger. Among
the 6,600 institutions subject to the Clery Act - anywhere a student can
use federal financial aid - interpretations of how to prepare the
reports and what to include vary substantially.

And yet the numbers, neither reliable nor comparable, are cropping up in
more places.

The U.S. Department of Education now publishes the crime statistics on a
user-friendly Web site (http://ope.ed.gov/security) and tells
prospective applicants to use College Navigator, its online-search tool,
to compare institutions side by side (four arsons at Amherst, zero at
Williams). Other new programs designed to promote accountability
encourage similar comparisons of campus-crime figures ("Get the facts
for a smart college choice!"). Reader's Digest joined in last year,
ranking colleges on safety according to their crime rates.

Colleges spend a good deal of money putting out crime reports of
questionable value. How much the process costs, including percentages of
staff salaries, is so hard to calculate that even those who work on the
reports could not guess how much. The Clery Act's complexity requires
perpetual training, especially as amendments continue to change
colleges' reporting requirements. Dolores A. Stafford, chief of police
at George Washington University and a national expert on the Clery Act,
fields five or six calls a week from colleges that need help figuring
out what to report. When she travels to institutions for audits, she
always turns up errors in the way they are counting crimes. "Not once,"
she says, "have I found a campus that's completely in compliance."

The law has improved campuses' discussions of safety, several college
police chiefs say, leading to bigger security budgets and more education
programs. But with the reports, the law has done something else, says
Steve Bowser, director of public safety at Spelman College: "It has
created a bureaucracy."

Behind High Numbers

It has also produced deceptive data. Take the University of California
system. In 2007 the Davis campus listed 62 forcible-sex offenses. The
system's nine other campuses reported between zero and 22. San Diego -
with about 27,000 students, compared with Davis's 30,000 - listed just
two.

To the prospective student, Davis looks dicey. In fact, it may actually
be safer. Sexual assault is a historically underreported crime, and
outreach, which Davis does a lot of, encourages more victims to come
forward.

Davis's 30-year-old Campus Violence Prevention Program has benefited
from three long-serving staff members, strong support from the
university's chancellor, and multiple grants from the U.S. Department of
Justice's Office on Violence Against Women. Last year the program
reached more than 22,000 students with services in education,
prevention, and support.

"The students know where to go, and the people they go to know where to
send them," says Jennifer Beeman, director of the program, which
operates out of the campus police department. "If we're doing our job,
the numbers are going to be higher."

When crime statistics come out each year, Ms. Beeman looks at those of
other institutions, but she doesn't compare them with hers. "I don't
think that's fair," she says. She will, however, check other campuses
that have received violence-prevention grants from the Justice
Department, like Ohio State University and the University of
Minnesota-Twin Cities. There, as at Davis, she tends to see relatively
high numbers for sexual assault.

That's the context she offers parents at freshman orientation when she
shows them Davis's annual security report. "Initially parents look at
our numbers and think, 'Oh, dear Lord,'" Ms. Beeman says. "We really try
and frame it for them."

The Clery Act requires colleges to list any crime reported to "campus
security authorities," a designation that applies to pretty much anyone
who supervises students. In practice, most colleges focus on
law-enforcement officials, but Davis tries to reach a broader group.
Last year the university's compliance team, led by Ms. Beeman, sent
about 900 e-mail messages to staff members, linking to a PowerPoint
presentation on their responsibilities under the law. About half
responded, and Davis added any crimes they reported to the tally. The
law also requires colleges to solicit data from local police
departments, and last year Davis contacted 26 of them. A law clerk
synced those statistics with the campus totals.

Many colleges don't have the resources or the incentive to be that
meticulous. In 2000 the Education Department investigated the whole
University of California system, following articles in The Sacramento
Bee and a complaint from Security on Campus, the Clery Act's watchdog
group. The department issued no fines but determined that the system had
underreported crimes. Over the 18 years of the law, only five
institutions have been fined, up to $27,500 for each violation.

After the investigation, Davis redoubled its efforts toward full
disclosure. But campus-safety experts say the university's approach is
unusual. They suspect that many institutions simply import numbers from
the "Clery compliant" software programs sold to police departments and
send off their reports.

Such different methods hardly allow for apples-to-apples comparisons,
says Ms. Beeman.

"I'd be really leery to report my police statistics and call it a day,"
she says. "If one campus is doing that, and another campus is sending
over 800 people a thing saying, 'Have you heard anything?' ... then
you've got apples and - I don't even know. Apples and pork."

Legacy of Confusion

Reliable information was the goal of the Clery Act. It bears the name of
Jeanne Ann Clery, who, as a freshman at Lehigh University in 1986, was
raped and murdered in her dormitory room. Her parents, Constance B.
Clery and the late Howard K. Clery Jr., discovered that Lehigh had not
publicly disclosed several previous crimes on its campus, and they
appealed to state and federal lawmakers.

In 1990, in a wave of consumer-protection legislation, President George
H.W. Bush signed the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act. The Clerys
set up Security on Campus to monitor colleges' compliance.

The annual security reports, just one requirement under the law,
bestowed a legacy of confusion. A federal report in 1997 by what was
then called the General Accounting Office found "considerable variation
in colleges' practices for deciding which incidents to include in their
reports and what categories to use in classifying certain crimes."
Campus officials expressed frustration over a lack of adequate guidance.
Finally, in 2005, the Education Department published a Clery Act
handbook - after Security on Campus successfully lobbied Congress for a
$750,000 appropriation for the project.

The handbook weighs in at 216 pages but hardly resolves all the sticking
points. Campus police officers routinely struggle with the crime
classifications, which are used by the FBI. Nuances of a crime's
location are especially confounding, experts say.

In their annual reports, colleges must list crimes that occurred on
their campuses; in their residence halls; in "noncampus" buildings,
fraternity houses, and other facilities owned independently; and on
nearby public property. That last category is especially tricky. It
generally includes adjacent public sidewalks and streets, except when a
campus is surrounded by a wall. If a campus borders an ungated park,
however, crimes that occur up to one mile into that park should be
reported. But "public property" does not generally include, for example,
the parking lot of an apartment complex where many students live or the
strip of bars where they hang out.

Amid criticism, New York University announced in November that it would
revise its 2007 report to clarify the number of crimes in its residence
halls. With many of them scattered around the city, the university
considered only three to be on its campus. But after the student
newspaper described that practice, NYU said it would reissue its report
with a new category for off-campus dormitories. A university spokesman
said the adjustment would make the statistics "more meaningful."

Location is far from the only hang-up that plagues the reporting
process. Many colleges struggle with the distinctions among burglary,
robbery, and larceny (the last of which is not included in the reports).
Also, campus officials often mistake which crimes to count by victim
versus by incident, says Ms. Stafford, of George Washington University.
Aggravated assaults, for example, get counted by victim, but robberies -
even of five people by one perpetrator - should be counted by incident.

Advice from the Education Department doesn't always help. Several years
ago its auditors mistakenly told Virginia Tech that if crimes came to
light well after they had occurred, they should be counted not when they
were reported but in the year they actually happened. The agency
corrected its error, but not before many institutions scrambled to
adjust their numbers, which they then had to change back.

The quest for consistency continues, in training sessions conducted by
Security on Campus, the International Association of Campus Law
Enforcement Administrators, and a company called Westat, which manages
Clery Act compliance for the Education Department. From August until
December 2008, as colleges prepared and revised their reports, Westat's
help desk received 5,696 calls and 984 e-mail messages about how to
comply with the Clery Act.

Most inconsistencies in crime statistics come from good-faith mistakes,
campus-crime experts say, but some colleges may manipulate their
numbers. "You always have to think about, if the institutions are
creating the stats, you can make the statistics say what you want them
to say," says Steven J. Healy, chief of police at Princeton University
and a former president of the campus-law-enforcement group.

One police chief contacted by The Chronicle mentioned pressure from top
administrators to bring down high numbers. Another said he had heard of
padding totals, particularly of alcohol-related offenses, that looked
suspiciously low.

Sexual-assault statistics present a particular dilemma, says Douglas F.
Tuttle, an instructor and former public-safety director at the
University of Delaware who presents frequently on the Clery Act. Even
when students don't alert the campus police to a rape, they usually tell
someone. Mr. Tuttle would not want that person to look for a statistic
and not find it.

"If there was ever a year that we had no forcible-sex offenses on a
campus," he says, "I'd probably put one."

Straight Zeros

Westat is now perusing security reports for 2007. When its contractors
spot something unusual or suspicious, they contact the college in
question. Any murders or nonforcible-sex offenses, such as statutory
rape and incest, trigger calls. So do notable rises or drops in any
category over previous years.

David Bergeron, director of policy and budget development in the
Education Department's Office of Postsecondary Education, has been known
to pick up the phone himself. "People don't generally like it when I
call," he says.

Once he saw an institution report 999 hate crimes. As it turned out, he
says, "somebody thought it was a universal federal code for missing
data."

Another common mistake is conflating violations of state law and
institutional policy on alcohol and weapons. If an incident is both a
campus offense and a crime, it should be counted only as the latter. But
the distinction requires constant monitoring, says Mr. Tuttle: "Someone
has to say, 'Wait a minute, it's not illegal to have swords, it's just a
violation of our dorm rules, so we shouldn't count that one.'"

For the first time this year, Westat double-checked all institutions
that reported straight zeros: about 3,000, or 45 percent of them.
"That's a huge callback," says Mr. Bergeron. But even if the contractor
couldn't get to everyone, he says, "it just seemed like maybe a good
thing to do."

Westat inspects colleges' crime statistics as much as possible before
publishing them, but the Education Department still includes a
disclaimer on its Web site. "The crime data reported by the institutions
have not been subjected to independent verification by the U.S.
Department of Education," it says. "Therefore, the department cannot
vouch for the accuracy of the data reported here."

Mr. Bergeron acknowledges certain factors that complicate comparisons
between institutions. In some states, liquor laws are relatively strict.
In others, campus police officers have jurisdiction over wider
geographic areas beyond the campus. Still, he says, "the data are very
consistent."

'Colossal Waste'

Consistent or not, security reports can baffle a layperson. They're hard
to grasp without intimate knowledge of the law and its regulations. The
intended audience for the reports - prospective students and their
families - lacks that context.

"They'll assume that a campus that has 50 burglaries and 10 sexual
assaults is more dangerous than a campus that has 20 burglaries and two
sexual assaults," says Ms. Stafford. "And that very well may not be the
case."

The reports include total crimes, not rates. Higher numbers may be a
result of more-regular police patrols. And, as at Davis, creating an
environment where students feel comfortable reporting crimes also tends
to raise the tallies. Counting correctly, Ms. Stafford says, does that,
too.

In 2004, for example, New York University reported 14 burglaries. The
following year: 122. Someone who looks at the Education Department's
site, which shows three years of data, may wonder about the apparent
crime spree.

In NYU's own report on its Web site, there is an explanation. But the
footnote might not mean much to a student or parent. "Increase of
burglaries attributed to reclassification of certain larcenies based on
information ascertained at Iaclea national conference in 2005," it says.

That's assuming people will read the report at all. A few years ago,
when the law required colleges to print and distribute their annual
crime statistics, Ms. Stafford would make a point to visit freshman
dormitories on the day of delivery. "There were trash cans full of
them," she says. "It was a colossal waste of money."

Beginning in 2000, new regulations allowed institutions to publish their
reports online, but some colleges still print booklets.

There is scant research on who reads the reports in either format. In
2001, Steven M. Janosik, an associate professor of educational
leadership and policy studies at Virginia Tech, polled nearly 4,000
students at 300 colleges. About one in five had read his or her
college's annual security report. But more than nine in 10 said the data
had not influenced their decisions of where to enroll.

"These statistical reports aren't very helpful in the ways they were
intended," Mr. Janosik says. At the same time, he says, new amendments
and regulations make them more complex and cumbersome for colleges each
year.

"We'd be spending our time better if we worried less about the minutiae
and more about the programs and services that have a chance of changing
student behavior," Mr. Janosik says. "I would rather have a police
officer doing an educational program, making rounds of the campus,
trying to create safer environments, than I would have that same
individual behind a desk flipping through reports and tallying
frequencies."

A Flawed System

No one argues with the spirit of the Clery Act: that students and
parents should know what crimes occur on college campuses.
Administrators applaud the attention it has brought to campus safety and
point to the benefits of a requirement that colleges issue "timely
warnings" of immediate threats.

Before the law was passed, top officials generally shunned talk of crime
statistics, says Mr. Tuttle, of Delaware. Now, with those numbers
public, colleges are more likely to propose solutions, he says: "Having
something positive to say" about what your campus is doing to minimize
crime "becomes a selling point."

S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security on Campus,
defends the law's role even as he acknowledges its accumulated bulk.

"The Clerys never set out to create a government bureaucracy. They set
out to protect kids," he says. And yet "when the federal government gets
involved, layers of complexity get added."

Changes in the law in the past two decades have sought to make the
information the Education Department publishes more uniform across
institutions. Those amendments have left colleges trying to keep up -
not lobbying for an overhaul of the Clery Act.

"People are resigned to the fact that this is what we do," says Mr.
Healy, of Princeton, pointing out that cities have to file similar
annual reports. "There's desire for the law to be simplified," he says,
but "there's not a lot of desire out there for new amendments."

Beyond inconsistencies, the reporting process is based on a system that
criminologists find flawed, says John J. Sloan III, an associate
professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham.

Local and national crime statistics, if reported solely by
law-enforcement agencies, are inaccurate, says Mr. Sloan, who is writing
a book about campus crime. What produces better data, he says, is
"triangulation," or taking into account surveys of victims and criminals
as well.

Mr. Sloan calls the Clery Act's current reporting requirements "symbolic
politics." What may lead to safer campuses, he says, is a list of
minimum security requirements - such as blue-light telephones and
security cameras - with "real teeth" when colleges do not comply.

That's just one fix, he says, for a system that revolves around complex
annual reports, a huge investment with little return. "The focus," Mr.
Sloan says, "ought to shift from producing a bunch of statistics that
are basically useless."


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Section: Students
Volume 55, Issue 21, Page A1