How Transparent is Your College/University with Crime data?

There are thousands of college campuses across the US, each with their own public safety department. In an attempt to map crime on college campuses nationwide, SpotCrime also runs Ucrime.com.

Under the Jeanne Clery Act, passed in 1991 after Lehigh University student Jeanne Clery was murdered in her dorm room due to lapses in campus public safety, higher education public safety departments who participate in federal student financial aid programs in the US are required to release information on crime that has happened on or near their campus. The Act outlines requirements campus public safety departments need to follow in regards to publishing crime information.

The type of crime offenses needed to be disclosed (as defined in Sections (1)(F)) are “...murder, sex offenses, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, manslaughter, arson, and arrests or persons referred for campus disciplinary action for liquor law violations, drug-related violations, and weapons possession.” These incidents are similar to what is required by the FBI in UCR reports.

Campuses are also required (defined under Section(4)(A&B)) to maintain a daily log that records all crimes. And, agencies are required to respond to requests for the logs or information within 2 business days of the initial report being made to the department or a campus security authority.

It has been apparent in the past couple of years that not all college campuses are complying with the Jeanne Clery Act. The Obama Administration is currently investigating nearly 70 campuses for mishandling sexual assault complaints. 

In May 2013, Yale was fined $165,000 for Clery Act violations, including failure to report sexual assaults. Dozens more campuses are being fined for anything from inaccurately reporting crimes that occur to not having sufficient procedures in place to handle sexual assault. 

At Dartmouth, a student created his own crime map - ClearyDart.info - because he noticed Dartmouth Public Safety wasn’t doing enough to let students know about crime on campus. But, creating a crime map for Dartmouth wasn’t as easy as it had seemed. His public safety department wouldn’t provide electronic copies or even allow pictures of the daily crime log spreadsheet to be taken. The only way for anyone to collect information from the crime log is by going into the public safety office and writing it down.

The OU newspaper noticed their public safety department wasn’t responding to requests within the 2 day time limit allotted by the Act. 

There are many college campuses that publish a daily log on their website. The University of Chicago is a great example, even offering an RSS feed to their log. Schools like Princeton, MIT, or Harvard post their daily logs, however, they’re typically in an archaic, non-machine readable format (like a PDF). 

And at universities like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, not only is what they publish in a non-machine readable format, an online daily log is nonexistent or not updated. 

It’s surprising that more campuses aren’t publishing more information online for students to access with the amount of technology, money, and resources available to them. 

Because of these pitfalls in campus reporting, we’ve began ranking college campuses on how open they are with crime data. ‘Open’ meaning the data is available electronically in a machine readable format for anyone to use, share, and redistribute.

Check out our list below. We used the top 30 colleges/universities as ranked by USNews. We’ve also included which university/college was under investigation for Title IX Sexual Violence in 2014 and which has had a Clery Act violation since 1997.

Here is how our ranking system works:

0 - No incident reports available electronically. No daily log. They may have yearly statistics listed (just percentages), but a yearly summary is only part of what the Jeanne Clery Act requires. And percentages aren’t very useful when you’re trying to figure out what is happening day to day. So we’ve decided to keep these universities at a 0.

1 - There is something available electronically, but it’s not in a machine readable format (PDFs are not machine readable)

2 - These are universities that follow the definition of ‘open’ when it comes to releasing crime information.