Bill Calls for Disclosure on Campus Crime

An Assembly committee Wednesday overwhelmingly approved legislation requiring all colleges in California to disclose campus crime statistics to prospective students and their parents.

With parents of several slain college students standing by, the Assembly Ways and Means Committee sent the proposal by Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) to the Assembly floor on an 18-1 vote. The bill already has passed the Senate.

The measure would allow the Legislature to punish through budget sanctions public universities that do not disclose crime statistics. It would also give the attorney general authority to fine private colleges.

Torres said the disclosure requirement would pressure campuses to beef up security and provide better lighting in parking lots and other remote areas. “This is going to reduce college crime,” he said.

Figures in a special state Senate committee report released Wednesday show an increase in on-campus crime in California between 1983 and 1988. Incidents of rape on University of California campuses, for example, tripled during those five years from 6 to 18 reported cases.

Property crimes accounted for much of the increase in campus crime over the five years, the report showed. But for the last two years of the period--1987 and 1988--violent crime actually decreased by 16% on University of California campuses and 35% at California State University campuses.

Legislators on the committee expressed overwhelming support for the Torres measure, and several asked to be added as co-authors. Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), whose district includes four college campuses, cast the lone dissenting vote because analysts said the cost of the proposal to the state exceeded a committee threshold which would have required the bill to be held over until next week.

But Torres said he had the support of both public and private institutions, which would likely pay any expenses.

At a press conference before the hearing, parents of several students murdered on college campuses throughout the nation made emotional pleas for passage of the measure. The parents haltingly recounted horror stories of their children’s deaths and blasted universities for callously trying to cover up violent crime statistics to avoid criticism and keep enrollment high.

Howard Clery, whose daughter Jeanne was raped and killed in her dormitory room by another student at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, criticized the “medieval myth that a college that looks safe is safe.”

“(Administrators) will go to any length to cover up rates of crime on their campuses,” Clery said.