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.”