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Campus Crime Underreported

USA TODAY Cover story 10/4/00
Story Abstract

Colleges have been caught misreporting violence statistics. Now, an upgraded law penalizes $25,000 for each wrong figure.

By Donna Leinwand

USA TODAY

CLINTON, Iowa - She was a freshman in just her second week at Mount St. Clare College, partying with some guys in her dorm. It was the first time she had ever gotten drunk. That September night in 1995, she says, a fellow student sexually assaulted her in her room.

Feeling guilty and embarrassed, she waited three weeks before telling a dorm leader and then local police what had happened. The police interviewed her, as did officials at the 675-student school. By year's end, though, it was as if nothing had happened to the freshman.

Police, lacking sufficient evidence, charged no one. Worse, the woman says now, college officials never mentioned the incident again. In its annual crime report to the US. Department of Education, which compiles campus crime statistics for public review, Mount St Clare did not even acknowledge that an alleged rape had been reported.

Despite a federal law requiring schools to report alleged rapes, burglaries, assaults and many other types of crimes, the college had its own unwritten policy: No charges, no crime. In fact, for the 1995-1996 school year. Mount St Clare reported no crimes at all.

"They failed me," the woman says. "They just want to keep this image of how wonderful a school it is."

Federal officials say Mount St Clare is among dozens of colleges nationwide that for years have understated the number of crimes on their campuses. Some colleges have not counted crimes that occurred on city streets running through their campus. Other schools have omitted on-campus rapes that were reported to crisis centers or local police rather than to campus security Some haven't counted incidents that took place in fraternity or sorority houses.

Critics say colleges have wanted to avoid bad publicity; campus administrators counter that federal reporting requirements approved by Congress in 1990 were too vague. Now the U.S. government, using an amended version of the campus crime reporting law, is making an unprecedented push for accurate crime reports from colleges that receive federal aid. The schools have until Oct 17 to post tallies of alleged homicides, rapes. assaults. arson, hate crimes, burglaries. liquor law violations and drug arrests on the Education Department's Web site (ope.ed.gov/security), where parents and students can view them.

Under the revised law colleges filing false reports face a $25,000 fine for each misreported figure. In April, Mount St Clare be-came the first college to be fined.

"Colleges were looking for technicalities and loopholes to avoid reporting because of the bad publicity that engenders," says Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who pushed for more accurate reports after receiving complaints from parents and students. "I was madder than hell."

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that 23 of the 25 colleges it audited in 1997 did not properly report their crime statistics, particularly incidents involving rapes and assaults. In the past decade, the Education Department has audited more than 100 colleges' crime reports and found problems with nearly every one. Among the examples documented by federal auditors in the past six years:

• The University of Florida acknowledged excluding 35 rape cases from its crime reports from 1996 to 1998. The school's tally for that period included 12 alleged rapes reported to university officials but failed to include rapes reported to the victims' advocacy center on the 42,300-student campus in Gainesville.

• The University of Pennsylvania, an urban campus of 21,700 students in Philadelphia, reported 18 armed robberies to the federal government in 1996. But campus police actually worked more than 200 robberies in their patrol area. In its federal report, the university excluded crimes that occurred on the city sidewalks and streets that crisscross its campus.

• Minnesota State University-Moorhead reported one sexual assault in the 1994-1995 school year, but the local rape crisis center's statistics indicate that 35 of the alleged sexual assaults it handled took place on the 7,400-student campus. U.S. officials say the school did not try to determine which incidents reported to the center were campus crimes.

The new reporting requirements that are beginning to change the way colleges count crimes were approved by Congress in 1998.

They expand the definition of a campus to include city streets that cut through college tracts and require colleges to include all criminal complaints, proven or not. School officials must survey campus organizations, local police, rape crisis centers and dorm leaders for alleged crimes that might not have been reported to campus police. Schools must publicize their reporting procedures and crime statistics.

In April, Mount St Clare was ordered to pay $25,000 for what federal officials called a history of deception in its crime reports. Mount St. Clare officials, saying they had simply interpreted reporting requirements differently than federal bureaucrats, have filed an administrative appeal with the federal government

"This wasn't ever a situation that statistics were left out intentionally" says Wylie Pillers Ill, Mount St. Clare's general counsel. "Bigger schools did things worse than we did. They were not fined."

Schools blame vague guidelines

The push for more accuracy comes as a few isolated violent incidents on campuses have made parents more vocal about student safety even with crime rates relatively low Just last week, freshman Eric Plunkett was found beaten to death in his dorm room in Washington, D.C., at Gallaudet University the nation's only university for the deaf and hard of hearing. The third violent death in the school's 136 -year history has led the university to increase security and limit dorm access. On Tuesday, police charged a fellow student in Plunkett's death.

Like officials at Mount St Claire, many administrators say the underreporting of alleged crimes has had more to do with the initially vague federal guide-lines than any effort to mislead anyone about the breadth of campus crime. But some administrators also say they are uneasy about reporting every alleged crime on their campus. They say statistics spiked with unfounded allegations will make their generally safe environs seem more dangerous than they really are.

"Campus safety is a crucial issue. It's a sensitive is-sue," says Doug Hamilton, a spokesman for Minnesota State University-Moorhead. He says his school now meets federal requirements. "We just want to make sure it's put in the proper context"

The intent here is to adhere to the law," says Ken Wildes, a University of Pennsylvania spokesman. "Give us some direction, and we'll do what you want"

Wildes says that the Ivy League school now comp lies with the broader reporting requirements. "We have always wanted to be as open and honest about crime reporting as we could possibly be."

The University of Florida also says the problems in its crime reports from past years stemmed from confusion about the U.S. requirements.

"We want to be open and upfront so that people are fully aware of what may happen here," says Jim Scott, dean of student affairs. "Most college students do have a sense of infallibility We want them to see the importance of locking their doors and taking precautions."

Specter and other critics of inaccurate campus crime reports place some blame on the Education Department, which they say wrote muddy regulations a decade ago then was lax in enforcing them.

"Schools will go to great lengths to avoid providing information they believe will reflect negatively on the school." says Mark Goodman of the Student Press law Center in Arlington, Va., which has fought in court to open school disciplinary records. "The Department of Education had supported schools in their efforts to cover up. For the first ti me, they've actually fined a school. That is a pretty dramatic change.

Education officials deny shielding colleges and say that in the past they simply tried to get compliance without resorting to fines.

'We're on the right track," Assistant Education Secretary A. Lee Fritschler says. "Our objective is to work with colleges to meet their obligation and report accurate statistics. The majority of colleges do that. However, sanctions may be imposed for serious violations."

'It may send a false message'

At first glance, Mount St. Clare seems an unlikely first target for the federal crackdown. The Catholic-oriented college's brochure touts "the security and relaxed pace of a midsize Midwestern city" a reasonable claim in a town without much

crime.

Police here say that there were 22 burglaries on campus last year, but that most of them were by one student who worked in a campus office and had access to keys. The neighborhood around the college is "relatively speaking, low on crime," Clinton police It. Randy Meier says.

It's the way that Mount St Clare officials have treated what crime the campus does have that has drawn U.S. officials' attention. Three years after the case in 1995 involving an alleged rape, another Mount St Clare student alleged that a campus visitor had sexually assaulted her. Again, Clinton police said they didn't have enough evidence to charge anyone. And again, the college didn't mention the incident in its annual report to the Education Department.

Only after the agency audited Mount St Clare's crime reports was the incident added to the college's 1998 list. This month, the victim in the latter incident sued the college, alleging that the school's disregard of student safety led to her being raped.

Mount St Clare officials a greed reluctantly to add other alleged assaults to their crime reports under pressure from the government, but they still say such incidents should not be listed because they can unfairly give a negative impression of a college's crime situation. "If you have to report everything, it may send a false message," Pillers says. "Many times you have a 'he-said, she-said' situation."

Father David Brownfield, a Mount St Clare chaplain, calls the federal crime-reporting requirements "well-intentioned government regulation gone amok"

He recalls his days as a student at the University of Illinois when a shoe bandit roamed campus. "It was a prank It wasn't a threat Now we'd have to list it as 500 thefts. A parent would see that and panic"

Howard and Connie Clery of King of Prussia, Pa., sent their daughter, Jeanne, to Lehigh University in 1985. They figured she would be safe at the small-town campus in Bethlehem, Pa.

In the spring of her freshman year, Jeanne was raped and lulled in her dorm room by a sophomore who lived off campus. He entered her dorm through a door that had been propped open with a pizza box. He was convicted in 1987 and is on death row.

After their daughter's slaying, the Clerys learned that Lehigh's crime rate was higher than they had thought. In the three years before Jeanne's death, the campus had 38 violent crimes. The Clerys founded a non-profit group to lobby Congress for campus crime disclosure and prevention laws. The law Congress passed in 1998 to improve campus crime reporting was named The Jeanne Clery Act.

Lehigh officials have improved campus security since Clery was killed, and violent crime there is down. Reports say there were 26 violent crimes reported from 1996 through 1998. Dorms have card-operated electronic locks.

The Clerys welcome the changes and vow to continue pressing colleges to disclose more about campus crime. They also warn parents and students to examine closely colleges' crime figures.

"When you see a school of 4,000 or 5,000 (students) and they are only reporting one rape and only five or six (cases of) underage drinking (per year). you know it's phony" Howard Clery says. "Don't believe them unless it's a seminary or a yeshiva."

He adds: 'Why do they have rape crisis centers if nobody is being raped?"

• Freshmen should decline to have their photos and personal information published for distribution to the campus community Some have used such publications to "target" naive freshmen.

• Share your schedule with parents and a network of close friends.

• Survey the campus after dark to see that buildings. walkways, quadrangles and parking lots are adequately secured, lighted and patrolled.

• To gauge the social scene, drive down fraternity row on weekend nights and stroll through the student hangouts. Are people behaving responsibly?

• Doors and windows to your residence hall should be equipped with quality locks. Room doors should have peepholes and deadbolts. Do not loan out your key. Never compromise your safety for a roommate who wants the door left unlocked. Replace locks when a key is lost or stolen.

Source: Security on Campus, Inc.