Crime on college campuses is nothing new; but due to events occurring in recent years on campuses has brought more fear and alarm among students wanting a college education. Parents are also concerned about the surge of criminal activity on college campuses; they want to spend their money on a good education for their sons and daughters in a safe learning environment. Examples of campus crimes that gained national attention was the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007; in which Seung-Hui Cho, a senior English major, killed 32 people and wounded 25 before committing suicide; the 2009 murder of Yale University graduate student Annie Le, 24, whose body was stuffed behind a wall the same day she was to be married; and the 2010 shooting of three Ohio State University employees. Two of the victims were wounded while the other died. And now there are the alleged sexual abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse universities.
Local crimes on campus have not gone unnoticed in the news. NBC4 Washington, WUSA9 and The Washington Post have all reported recent occurrences of campus crimes that include attempted rapes and sexual assaults at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) and Montgomery Community College, the rash of robberies at UMCP, and the September 2011 murder of 18-year-old freshman Dominique T. Frazier of Washington, D.C. Frazier was killed by one of her roommates, Alexis D. Simpson, 19, of District Heights, Maryland. Simpson stabbed Frazier in the throat; according to investigators an argument started which turned into a physical fight over an iPod. Both were students at Bowie State University, located in Bowie, Maryland.
"Dominique Frazier, a precious life, a valued member of our university community, has been taken from us,” said university president Mickey L. Burnim. “Our community and our family has permanently changed.”
There are requirements, however, that keep tabs on college campuses when crime occurs for data and security purposes. Wikipedia provides the following information below -
The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Actor Clery Act is a federal statute codified at 20 U.S.C. § 1092(f), with implementing regulations in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations at 34 C.F.R. 668.46.
The Clery Act requires all colleges and universities that participate in federal financial aid programs to keep and disclose information about crime on and near their respective campuses. Compliance is monitored by the United States Department of Education, which can impose civil penalties, up to $27,500 per violation, against institutions for each infraction and can suspend institutions from participating in federal student financial aid programs.
The law is named for Jeanne Clery, a 19-year-old Lehigh University freshman who was raped and murdered by another student, Josoph Henry, in her campus residence hall in 1986. The Clery Act, signed in 1990, was originally known as the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act.
The Daily Beast, a reporting and opinion website, did an article in September 2010 announcing their second annual ranking of the most dangerous colleges and universities in the United States. Below is a snapshot taken from the article “The Daily Beast College Safety Rankings."
The accuracy and consistency of the crime data reported to the federal government has also continued to improve, says S. Daniel Carter, the director of Public Policy for Security on Campus Inc. “The data is still not perfect,” says Carter. “It’s always about context. There’s a lot of context and nuance to crime statistics.” Starting this fall, schools will be required to report extended statistics on hate crimes. New federal regulations that deal with campus emergencies (prompted by the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007), fire safety, hate crimes, and missing students took effect on July 1.
For The Daily Beast’s second annual ranking of the most dangerous colleges in the U.S., we pored over the three most recent calendar years of campus security and crime data (2006-2008) compiled by the U.S. Department of Education, as well as the FBI and the Secret Service, in conjunction with the Clery Act, the federal mandate requiring all schools that receive federal funding to disclose crime information annually. The data reflect incidents reported to campus or local police, not convictions.
Some ground rules: We only ranked colleges with residential facilities, as well as at least 6,000 enrolled students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. We also deferred to the NCES in determining what a “campus” is—for example, it groups the two main campuses for Tufts University as a single entity, even though they are seven miles apart (Tufts’ Boston campus is the reason it ranked so poorly). This produced a total comparison of 458 schools across the country.
While the rankings provide an interesting glimpse into the state of major crimes across campuses, it’s an imperfect science. “One thing to recognize is that no campus is immune from crime,” says Carter. Prospective students and parents should look at the annual security report that every college is required to compile for the best glimpse into campus safety. While the rankings provide an interesting glimpse into the state of major crimes across campuses, it’s an imperfect science. “One thing to recognize is that no campus is immune from crime,” says Carter. Prospective students and parents should look at the annual security report that every college is required to compile for the best glimpse into campus safety.
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