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Under the Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security
Act of 1990, colleges and universities were required to publish statistics
in nine categories: incidents of murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault,
burglary, and motor-vehicle theft; and arrests for liquor-, drug-, and
weapons-law violations. The law was amended by the Higher Education Act
of 1992 to replace the rape statistics with data for forcible and non-forcible
sex offenses. Many institutions now report those, but some continue to
report rape only.
Because of inconsistencies, the statistics for sex
crimes are hard to compare. Non-forcible offenses are supposed to include
only incest and statutory rape, but some colleges mistakenly reported other
offenses in the category.
Some institutions also included in their arrest
data tickets or citations that were considered “arrests,” even though they
did not involve a person’s being taken into custody.
Dashes instead of numbers in an institution’s statistics
indicate that information was not available. In many cases, the institution
did not provide data for a certain category.
The current survey deleted four institutions that
have appeared in previous years because their enrollments were below 5,000
or dropped below that level in 1996-97. They are Chapman University, Loyola
University of New Orleans, the University of Baltimore, and Robert Morris
College in Pennsylvania.
Experts on campus crime warn that comparisons among
institutions must be undertaken with caution. The crime reports do not
consider the nature of the institutions (rural or urban, residential or
commuter, etc.). In addition, institutions with highly professional police
departments may pursue crime more aggressively than do those that handle
most incidents through a campus judicial system. High numbers may not mean
that a campus is less safe than others.
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