1st Database of College Crime Put on Internet

UCLA reported eight sexual assaults on campus last year; USC had seven. Thirty-eight cars were stolen from Cal State Northridge parking lots last year. UC Irvine had 25 aggravated assaults and 215 burglaries.

Whether those are numbers to worry about is open to debate. But for the first time, the public has easy access to crime statistics from these colleges and 4,200 others. The data can be found on a Web site provided by the U.S. Department of Education, ope.ed.gov/security.

Records from an additional 2,000 colleges and universities scrambling to meet Tuesday’s filing deadline will be ready for scrutiny as quickly as officials can post them.

The Web site has become available just when America’s high school seniors and their parents are deciding where to apply to college.

The idea, pushed in Congress by the families of college murder and rape victims, is to help students and their parents gauge the relative safety of campuses.

But even the officials charged with posting the numbers warn that the gauge is far from perfect.

Often, campuses that are more aggressive in combating crime are the ones that come out looking worse in comparative statistics, said A. Lee Fritschler, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for post-secondary education.

“If a school reports a large number of alcohol arrests, it may be that it’s working hard to eliminate alcohol problems, not that it has a particularly bad drinking problem,” Fritschler said.

Campus safety experts caution against comparing the raw numbers. Higher numbers do not mean that a campus is unsafe, because reporting is inconsistent and the figures are influenced by so many factors.

Colleges vary enormously in size. Some have thousands of students who live in campus residence halls, others are strictly commuter schools. Some are surrounded by high-crime urban neighborhoods; others are far removed from big cities and their troubles.

Campuses are inconsistent on what statistics they include, such as crimes committed on “reasonably contiguous” areas such as streets, sidewalks and parking lots.

Cal State Dominguez Hills, for example, had few crimes on campus, but reported that the surrounding neighborhoods in southern Los Angeles County had 10 murders, 50 forcible sex offenses, 535 aggravated assaults and 599 burglaries last year.

By contrast, USC, which is in South-Central Los Angeles, reported no crime from the surrounding neighborhood. “We have not been able to retrieve that data from LAPD,” said Steven Ward, chief of the USC’s Department of Public Safety.

“We’re trying to figure out what the Department of Education wants,” he said. “Part of the problem is that the law is very poorly written, and very poorly interpreted.”

Although murder on college campuses is extremely rare, most large urban campuses frequently deal with half a dozen or more reported sexual assaults, as well as a few robberies, aggravated assaults and dozens of burglaries.

At UCLA, the campus reported three robberies, 10 aggravated assaults, 136 burglaries, 44 vehicle thefts and one arson--as well as the eight forcible sexual assaults.

All but one of the sexual assaults were “acquaintance rapes,” said Nancy Greenstein, UCLA’s director of police community services. UCLA’s daytime population averages 60,000 to 70,000 people, she said, making it the equivalent of a mid-sized city.

“We’re not immune from crime,” she said. “We reflect the region, but if anything, we’re safer.”

The posting of the crime data has been a decade in the works. In 1990, Congress passed the Clery Act, named after Jeanne Clery, a 19-year-old who was raped and murdered in her dorm room at LeHigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., in 1986.

But in 1997 congressional investigators found haphazard compliance with the law. Few colleges were making crime statistics easily available to the public; some were ignoring the law altogether.

The next year, Congress toughened the law, adding potential fines of $25,000 for each unreported crime and requiring that the statistics be forwarded to the Education Department for public review.

As might be expected, this first attempt at a public database of campus crime was beset by computer glitches, most caused by too many last-minute filings.

“The process was a technical nightmare for many colleges,” said Stanley O. Ikenberry, president of the American Council on Education. Yet his group, which represents major universities, estimated that 97% of the 3,700 traditional two-year and four-year colleges and universities had submitted their data or were doing so by the deadline.

The schools that have yet to file their data are mostly smaller proprietary institutions, such as beauty schools and commercial art schools, which may not be aware of the rules, he suggested.

Yet critics contend that schools have long hidden behind a veil of secrecy to protect their interests and reputations.

“It is usually the senior administrators, not the campus police, who want to hide this stuff,” said S. Daniel Carter, vice president of Security on Campus Inc. “No one wants to look bad. And no one wants to go first.”

Security on Campus, which was founded by the Clery family, complains that the compiled statistics remain confusing and that the Education Department has not aggressively enforced compliance.

The group recently filed complaints with the Education Department alleging that the University of California and California State University systems have not fully complied with disclosure laws. Officials of the two university systems deny the accusation, and Education Department officials are reviewing the complaint.