CHICAGO — Under the old rules of campus crime reporting, BrookBaker’s murder didn’t count. The Vincennes University student waskilled in 1997 in an apartment across the street from the Indianacommunity college, so Vincennes officials were free to exclude theincident from their annual report on campus crime.
The new rules — which make their debut in this year’s reports andwere released this week–were supposed to force the nation’s collegesto provide more information to help students and their parents assesscampus safety. Schools are now required to report more offenses thatdon’t lead to arrests, for example, and to give a more detailedbreakdown of violent crimes.
But the most significant change — a requirement that schoolsreport crimes that happen on public property adjacent to theircampuses — is subject to such wide interpretation that it isvirtually meaningless, safety activists complain.
“I count the near sidewalk (bordering the campus), the street andthe far sidewalk,” said Dolores Stafford, a board member of theInternational Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administratorsand police director at George Washington University in Washington.”Where I wouldn’t be required to count is a building on the otherside of the street that the university doesn’t own.”
In other words, Baker’s murder still wouldn’t be counted,according to the association.
A check of schools in the region showed varying interpretations.At Northwestern University, officials count crimes in areas thatextend more than a half-mile from campus in some directions,encompassing many private businesses and residences. But at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago, officials adopted the narrowassociation definition, except for some added territory at commonlyused train stops.
Vincennes officials wouldn’t comment on whether they would reporta crime like the Baker murder now.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Education, who wrote therules, declined to give specific guidelines, saying the schools canbe relied on to make those judgments.
That answer doesn’t satisfy campus safety activists. “The schoolsare (the Education Department’s) clients, and they know the schoolsdon’t really want this,” said Howard Clery III of Security on Campus,a Pennsylvania-based group that has pushed for better campus crimereporting for 14 years. “I think there’s purposely a lot of wiggleroom.”
Campus crime reporting began in 1990, when Congress passed theCrime Awareness and Campus Security Act. Congress amended the law in1998 in an attempt to strengthen it; the Education Department’s newrules, issued last year, were meant to clarify those amendments.
On some counts, the new numbers are clearly more complete. Schoolsare now required to report violations of alcohol, drug and weaponlaws they handle through internal discipline systems. In the past,schools reported those offenses only if police made arrests.
The new rules also require schools to break down crimes into morecategories and increase the number of school officials who have aduty to report crimes they learn about.
Some schools have adopted approaches that result in more crimereporting than the position taken by the campus law-enforcementassociation would require.
At Northwestern, officials drew the public property boundariesalong the same lines as local police beats. That made it easier tocollect data from the police. But in Evanston, it meant reportingsome crimes that occurred more than a half-mile west of campus. As aresult, the school’s public property category added 16 robberies, 80minor assaults and 412 thefts to its report.
At the University of Illinois at Chicago, officials did not reportcrimes at any off-campus apartments or restaurants. The school doesplan to update its Web site to include a link to Chicago policestatistics for the area, said Renee Reifsteck, assistant universitycounsel.
