Campus Safety Nationwide and Close To Home

HEADLINE: Campus Safety Nationwide and Close to Home

SUBHEAD: Finding a safe campus may not be as easy as it seems.

By Mi Kayla Whitman

LEAD:Take a moment to Google “campus safety” and you will quickly realize that it is a growing concern all across America. You will see thousands of articles explaining how to stay safe on campus, and lists of colleges that have the least reported crime or best policing. But what should we make of all of this?

According to YourLocalSecurity.com, the top five safest campuses are Lakeland Community College in Kirkland Ohio, Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois, Foothill College in Los Alto Mills, California, University of the Cumberlands in Williamsburg Kentucky, and West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas.

Lakeland Community College

CollegeStats.org conducted a similar study, but contained the study to the top 100 most attended colleges. Of these, the top five safest are Clemson in South Carolina, FIT in New York City, Northeastern Illinois in Chicago, York College in Jamaica, New York, and GW in Washington D.C.

Clemson University

What does it mean to be one of the “safest” schools, and how are they getting on this list? It all has to do with the Clery Act, which requires campuses to report crimes. BestColleges.com explained how the Clery Act came to be by saying, “Named for Jeanne Clery, the 1986 victim of a rape and murder at Lehigh University, the act requires that all campuses have detailed emergency alert systems in place, as well as comprehensive crime reporting statistics.”

The requirements of the Clery Act include: publishing an annual security report, maintaining a public crime log, disclosing crime statistics for incidents within a set area, and reporting on seven major crime categories. These categories are criminal homicide, sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

Even with this act in place, it is sometimes still hard to decipher a safe school from a dangerous one. CollegeFactual.com states that low crime reports from a university doesn’t always mean it’s safe, it could just mean there is lax reporting. This could be pointing to a potentially larger problem at the campus. If there is lax reporting of crimes, one could assume that there is also lax response to crimes and students may not have the resources they need in the event that they become a victim of a crime.

To bring this matter closer to home, I decided to take a look at a few campuses in Iowa and see how they measure up. According to YourLocalSecurity.com, as of 2018 the safest campus in Iowa can be found at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. I decided to look into this a little bit deeper.

Iowa has just under 31,000 students, and they had 1443 “safety related incidents involving students” in 2018. This comes out to be about 46.78 reports per 1000 students.

University of Iowa

However, according to CollegeFactual.com, 2795 colleges and universities reported crimes, and of these 2770 reported less crimes than Iowa. This doesn’t look so good for the Hawkeyes.

Iowa State University had 772 reports, and with nearly 36,000 students this means about 21.62 reports per 1000 students.

Iowa State University

The University of Northern Iowa had 522 incidents reported. With nearly 12,000 students this means about 43.57 reports per 1000 students.

University of Northern Iowa

I find it important to note how many of these reports are liquor law violations. Colleges are a breeding ground for underage drinking, and many students are bound to get caught, but I find these types of violations are quite different from say a robbery or a sexual assault. At Iowa, 38.53% of their reported crimes were liquor law violations, At Iowa State, 37.04% and at UNI, a whopping 45.78%.

A campus crime topic that always seems to be in the news and is a concern for students when deciding on a school, is sexual crimes on campus. Iowa had 73 sexual crimes reported, Iowa State had 23, and UNI had 9. The percentage of crimes reported that were sexual was 5%, 2.9%, and 1.7% respectively. According to the numbers, The University of Iowa is actually the least safe out of the three state universities in Iowa. All of these numbers can be found on the universities’ respective Annual Security and Fire Safety Reports.

So, from all of this, what can we learn?

It’s not as simple as a website telling you a campus is safe. Even with a great thing like the Clery Act, that doesn’t always mean that campuses are diligently reporting crimes either. Furthermore, just because a campus has a lot of reported crimes doesn’t mean it’s any less safe than another campus, they may just be better at reporting them which is a good thing.

If you are concerned about campus safety, do some digging. Take a look at their annual crime report and see just what types of crimes are happening often. If you can, talk to students that go there. Ask them what the environment is like, ask how the relationship is between campus police and students, ask how they feel about their campus’ safety. Always remember- there's a lot more to campus safety than meets the eye.