2021 Update to the SpotCrime University Police Transparency Ranking

We updated the SpotCrime University Transparency Ranking! The last time we ranked access to crime data at universities was in 2017. We specifically look at access to the Jeanne Clery Act crime logs.

The Jeanne Clery Act passed in 1990 and in addition to annual reports and timely notices of crimes, it requires a crime log to be kept and be made available and open for public inspection during normal business hours for the most recent 60-day period. Unfortunately, the law was created before the impetus of the internet, however a majority of university police departments across the US publish their crime and fire log directly to their website.

In this round of ranking we wanted to know if the transparency level of a city police department influenced the transparency level of the university police department since jurisdictions of a university police department and local police department overlap. We looked at the 10 most populated cities (New York, LA , Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose), found a few of the largest universities located in each, and ranked their university police departments that had not already been ranked. This added 32 universities to our transparency ranking.

A big change made to the ranking, in addition to adding 32 universities, was we no longer made it acceptable to receive a 2 ranking if the crime log is posted in a pdf format. A 2 ranking is now only for universities publishing data in machine readable format. Out of the original 29 universities we ranked no university was moved to a 0 ranking (this would have meant that the university completely removed their Clery log from their website). Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of California - Berkeley were moved from a 2 to a 1 ranking.

Additionally, any university using a proprietary crime map as the sole source of public crime information was also moved to a 0. Notre Dame University was the only university we had to move to a 0 because of this change. The good news however is that Emory University and University of Michigan - Ann Arbor were both moved to a 2 ranking.

We found that there is no real relationship between the transparency level of a city police department and its corresponding university police department. For example, Chicago has had an open data feed since SpotCrime’s inception over 10 years ago and out of the 5 universities in Chicago we looked at - DePaul University, Illinois Institute of Technology, Loyola University Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, and University of Chicago - two had a 0 ranking (DePaul and University Illinois at Chicago), one had a 1 ranking (Illinois Institute of Technology), and 2 had a 2 ranking (Loyola University Chicago and University of Chicago).

This is reflective of data transparency on a national level as there is no national standard or regulation behind releasing this crime data. Again, using Chicago as an example, in addition to Chicago PD and the university police departments there is also the Cook County Sheriff and over a dozen smaller cities with their own police departments within Cook County. Each police department shares their crime data in different ways, in different formats, to different platforms, and updates at different rates. It can be speculated that even if there was a national standard behind releasing crime data, as we have found with Clery, police departments will still find their own ways to do the bare minimum in reporting to the public.

It is surprising in 2021 to have technologically capable universities like Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and Brown University not publishing their Clery logs to their respective websites (all 3 universities get a 0 ranking from us). They instead require anyone interested in the Clery crime log to come into the police department to look at the crime log in person. When we learned Carnegie Mellon wouldn’t even email the Clery log over to us we asked them a few questions surrounding their policy. We learned that you are only allowed to look at the Clery log as there is no xerox machine available to make copies, and Carnegie Mellon noted ‘hardly any’ people come in to look at the log.

If no one has time to come into the office to look at the logs, why does Carnegie Mellon not publish it to their website to make sure they are making it as easy as possible to learn about crime on campus? We are not sure. It makes us wonder if Carnegie Mellon would even keep a crime log if not required by Clery.

So, does your university police department make crime data openly available to everyone? Are we missing a university on our list? Let us know!

University	Rank	City	Rank
Dartmouth College	0	Hanover, NH	0
Yale University	1	New Haven, CT	0
Washington University in St Louis	1	St Louis, MO	0
Harvard University	1	Cambridge, MA	1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	1	Cambridge, MA	1
Cornell University	2	Ithaca, NY	1
Tufts University	0	Medford, MA	1
Vanderbilt University	1	Nashville, TN	1
Columbia University	0	New York City, NY	1
New York University	2	New York City, NY	1
California Institute of Technology	0	Pasadena, CA	1
Princeton University	1	Princeton, NJ	1
University of California - Santa Barbara	1	Santa Barbara, CA	1
University of Notre Dame	0	South Bend, IN	1
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor	2	Ann Arbor, MI	2
Emory University	2	Atlanta, GA	2
Johns Hopkins University	1	Baltimore, MD	2
University of California - Berkeley	1	Berkeley, CA	2
University of North Carolina	2	Chapel Hill, NC	2
University of Virginia	2	Charlottesville, VA	2
University of Chicago	2	Chicago, IL	2
Duke University	1	Durham, NC	2
Northwestern University	2	Evanston, IL	2
University of Florida	0	Gainesville, FL	2
Rice University	2	Houston, TX	2
University of California - Los Angeles	0	Los Angeles, CA	2
University of Southern California	1	Los Angeles, CA	2
University of Pennsylvania	1	Philadelphia, PA	2
Carnegie Mellon University	0	Pittsburgh, PA	2
Brown University	0	Providence, RI	2
San Francisco State University	2	San Francisco, CA	2
Stanford University	0	Stanford, CA (Santa Clara County, CA)	2
Georgetown University	1	Washington, DC	2
Wake Forest University	1	Winston-Salem, NC	2
University of Texas at Austin	1	Austin, TX	2
St Edwards University	2	Austin, TX	2
DePaul University	0	Chicago, IL	2
University of Illinois at Chicago	0	Chicago, IL	2
Illinois Institute of Technology	1	Chicago, IL	2
Loyola University Chicago	2	Chicago, IL	2
University of North Texas at Dallas	1	Dallas, TX	2
University of Texas at Dallas	1	Dallas, TX	2
Southern Methodist University	2	Dallas, TX	2
University of Dallas	2	Dallas, TX	2
Tarleton State university	0	Fort Worth, TX	2
University of Texas at Arlington- Fort Worth	0	Fort Worth, TX	2
Texas Christian University	2	Fort Worth, TX	2
Houston Baptist University	0	Houston, TX	2
Texas Southern University	1	Houston, TX	2
University of Houston	1	Houston, TX	2
University of St Thomas	1	Houston, TX	2
Drexel University	1	Philadelphia, PA	2
Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine	2	Philadelphia, PA	2
Temple University	2	Philadelphia, PA	2
Arizona State University	1	Phoenix, AZ	2
St Mary's University	0	San Antonio, TX	2
Texas A&M University - San Antonio	0	San Antonio, TX	2
Trinity University	1	San Antonio, TX	2
University of Texas at San Antonio	2	San Antonio, TX	2
University of California - San Francisco	2	San Francisco, CA	2
San Jose State University	1	San Jose, CA	2