(continued from top of page) 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 persons being taken into custody. Dashes instead of numbers in an institutions 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. |