Campus Crime Database
Enter the full or partial name of any college or university to search for crime statistics filed with the U.S. Department of Education under the Clery Act.
2004-2005: Campus crime and the Clery Act
Students' stories making a difference!
In an effort to increase awareness and use of public information laws, in 2004 the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas joined with journalism departments at universities across the state to launch the Light of Day project.
Each year, students at participating schools work on stories concerning the same agreed-upon theme.
FOIFT provided legal and logistical support, as the students and faculty employed state and federal freedom of information laws to explore various angles. Their stories, included below, have shed much light on the inconsistent practices and under-reporting of crime by campus police, prompting investigations, policy changes and awards for the participating student journalists.
Awards & Results
Student journalists from the University of North Texas (studying under Dan Malone) and Southern Methodist University (under Dr. Craig Flournoy) won a number of national awards for their work on the Light of Day project:
expandTheir statewide look at the failure of many Texas colleges to fully comply with the Clery Act won first and second prizes in regional and statewide journalism competitions, as well as a national Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Award, given by the nonprofit organization Security on Campus Inc. The story prompted an ongoing investigation by the federal Department of Education. Southern Methodist University changed its policy of not issuing campus-wide alerts for date rapes, after student journalists there raised questions about whether there should be such an exception to the rape alert requirements of the Clery Act. And, the president of the University of Texas at Dallas put together a commission to examine the SMU students' findings of poor living conditions and inadequate security at the university's only student housing.
That panel affirmed and expanded on the student journalists' findings (See press release at: http://www.utd.edu/news/archive/2005/housing-final-report.html). The report said the private and public officials responsible the apartment were more interested in making money than in providing decent housing and that more than half of 500 students surveyed had maintenance problems. It called for overhauling operations at the nation's largest private dorm and UTD president David Daniel promised to do so. In response, Dr. Daniel has ordered the inspection of all 1,238 apartments and ordered the hiring of 10 addition police officers -- a 60-percent increase.
In a case highlighted in the apartment stories, a Dallas County jury recently found a former University of Texas at Dallas student guilty of aggravated sexual assault with a deadly weapon. For that crime, the jury gave Prathap Rajamani 10 years probation and a $10,000 fine.
collapse Articles
Between 2001 and 2003, seven rape cases occuring on the University of Texas at Arlington were reported to UTA police, but despite a federal law requirement the UTA community was not informed, due to the fact that in these date rapes the involved parties knew each other. [read more]
Students at UTA were never told about two rapes that occured at Lipscomb Hall.
Insecurity on Campus
What colleges aren’t telling could hurt you.
Ft. Worth Weekly
Dec. 1, 2004
This story was reported and written by a team of journalism students at Southern Methodist University and the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas. The SMU team included Megan Connolly, Christine Dao, Farrar Johnson, Pablo Lastra, Jennifer McDowell, and Jessica Savage. At UNT, the team included Shalandys Anderson, Rebecca Ekpe, Jaclyn Gonzales, Christina Jancic, Elizabeth Lee, Lindsay Marshall, Brooke Scoggins, Hannah Seddelmeyer and Taylor Timmins. Texas Christian University student Melissa Christensen also contributed to this report.
Except for its violent conclusion, the warm Friday on the University of Texas at Arlington campus a year and a half ago might have passed as a typical spring evening on any college campus. Four friends — three young women and one young man, all students at UTA — piled into a car, headed for a couple of parties. The man, a UTA student we’ll call Tom, and one of the women, a 19-year-old freshman honor student we’ll call Lisa, sipped on Crown and Coke in the back seat as their friends drove them to a fraternity party at Tia’s Tex Mex. When that party ended around 2 a.m., the group returned to their car and set out for a frat house party not far from Lisa’s room at Lipscomb Dorm on the UTA campus.
By 3:30 a.m., Lisa was partied out. She felt sick and wanted to go home. Tom, a friend she’d met during the previous semester, walked with her. When they got to Lipscomb, he even came in with her, to make sure, he told her, that “she did not pass out and strangle while being sick.’’ Inside, Lisa went to the bathroom, changed into pajamas, and sat down on the edge of her bed. Tom placed a plastic wastebasket in front of her, and she promptly threw up into it. She returned to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and was hoping to crawl into bed when the young man who had pretended to be looking after her revealed his true intentions.
Tom grabbed Lisa, fell onto the bed on top of her, and began pulling off her pajamas. Lisa fought back and screamed. But Tom was overpowering. He stripped and entered her, and held her head down, covered with a pillow, to muffle the screams. Lisa went limp, hoping Tom would think she had passed out and that he would quit. But Tom kept on, and Lisa began to struggle again. Even as she screamed “no,” he told her, “You want it.’’ She screamed again, then cursed: “You fucking asshole.’’ And as Tom continued to rape her, he yelled back, “No, bitch. You’re the one getting fucked.’’ Then Tom grabbed Lisa’s hair, slammed her head on the headboard, and knocked her unconscious.
When Lisa regained consciousness seven hours later, her head was pounding with confusion. The man she considered a friend had beaten and raped her. At first she didn’t know what to do. On Saturday evening, she broke down in tears. Sunday morning, she confided in a girlfriend, then went to the campus police station and reported that she had been raped. Officers returned to her room to gather evidence — the blue sheets from her bed, the case from the pillow that had been pressed against her head, a pair of men’s green Hanes briefs, and a contact lens case — and filed the five-page report from which this account is taken.
What the campus police did not do — and what advocates maintain the federal law required them to do — was to inform the UTA community that a young woman had reported being raped and beaten unconscious in her dormitory room and that the fellow student she accused of sexually assaulting her remained at large, a potential danger to others. Lisa’s rape was among seven reported to UTA police between 2001 and 2003.
But students never received a campus-wide alert about Lisa’s rape or about another that also occurred in Lipscomb Hall. Why? Because, according to police officials, both were “date rapes” in which the victim and alleged perpetrator knew each other. It’s a distinction that college officials often make — and that makes rape experts and victims’ advocates furious.
Even without a campus-wide alert, some students might have learned of the rapes through daily crime logs that campus police compile. However, the rapes were listed in the logs only as “assaults.” UTA Assistant Police Chief James Ferguson’s only explanation was that police personnel who compile the logs don’t always have access to complete information.
Neither rape has been prosecuted. Tom was no-billed by a grand jury, and the accused assailant in the second rape remains under investigation.
The Clery Act — a federal law named after Jeanne Ann Clery, a college student who was raped, sodomized, tortured, and murdered in her dorm room in 1986 — requires universities to disclose campus crime statistics, publish daily crime logs, and distribute crime alerts to warn students and others of dangerous situations. But a statewide review — by journalism students at Southern Methodist University and the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas — found widespread non-compliance.
Meghan Connolly and Jamie Wedel
Ward: ‘The facts need to be made public.’
At many colleges, officials are failing to inform students about violent crime in and around their campuses. Last year, for instance, SMU police reported the rape of one student as an illness. SMU failed to issue alerts in four other rape cases because they said the assaults were date rapes — and that the alleged perpetrators therefore posed no threat to other students. El Centro College in Dallas does not notify students when a rape or other violent crime takes place at one of its satellite campuses, even though it has one of the highest crime rates among Texas colleges. And the two UTA rapes that campus police failed to tell students about were listed on the crime logs in the same category as water balloon fights.
Some other North Texas universities appeared to be doing a better job. A preliminary review of the University of North Texas and Texas Christian University, for example, showed that both schools appeared to be reporting the same information to the U.S. Department of Education that they shared with their students.
At other campuses, reporters were repeatedly denied permission to look at records, or the release was delayed for weeks, or only partial records were provided. In the Dallas County Community College system alone, responses to questions about crime records varied dramatically. Officers at two campuses said that the police keep a daily crime log but don’t let anyone see it. At Richland Community College, an officer said that the chief decides who gets to see the log of police activity. And at North Lake Community College, officials said that they follow the Clery Act “like it’s their Bible,” but then told a student reporter he would have to file an open records request to see the crime log. None of those responses is allowed under Clery.
In effect, many campus officials are misinterpreting or ignoring parts of the Clery Act in ways that leave their students in the dark about potential dangers, thereby undercutting the original purpose of the law. At one community college campus in Houston, for instance, students weren’t told about any of seven homicides that the college reported, as required, to the federal government. The college said it wasn’t required to alert its students to those crimes because the deaths didn’t occur on the campus proper, but in a nearby high-crime area.
Those findings don’t surprise S. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security on Campus, Inc., the Pennsylvania non-profit organization founded by Jeanne Ann Clery’s parents for the purpose of improving safety on college campuses.
“It’s not that the police don’t want to [report the crimes],’’ Carter said, “It’s that they are put under pressure not to.’’
Clery was a 19-year-old freshman at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University when she was raped and killed on campus. In the aftermath of Jeanne’s death, her parents, Howard and Connie, learned that almost 40 violent crimes had taken place on the Lehigh campus in the three previous years — and that students had been informed of none of them. Joining forces with other campus crime victims, the Clery family lobbied Congress to require colleges to disclose information about crime on campuses. Their effort resulted in the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990, which eventually became known simply as the Clery Act.
Carter said the law is designed to make sure that students and their families are fully informed about potential dangers on campus, and to prevent college officials from hiding the facts. The Clery Act is intended primarily to address the campus, he said, “because before, that is where school had the most power to keep info bottled up.” The act “made this information public.”
After concerns about faulty crime reporting were raised earlier this year, the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas offered to help journalism students across the state examine Clery Act compliance at public and private universities. As part of that “Light of Day” project, SMU and UNT students compiled statistics for violent and property crimes on more than 100 campuses and nearby public properties for 2001 to 2003.
The federal law is intended, in part, to give students and their parents enough information about crime rates at and near colleges to make good decisions about where to go to school. But the UNT and SMU reporters found that many colleges make that very difficult. Texas Wesleyan University, for example, delayed inspection of its records for weeks by insisting that the material wasn’t public. Texas Woman’s University made records for only the last year available for inspection, and said records from previous years, which other universities routinely maintain and make available, had been destroyed.
The Clery Act requires that only basic information be provided about each crime. At public universities, students could theoretically get additional information from the offense reports maintained by most campus police and security forces. Texas law makes such information public — but some university officials also make it expensive. For example, the student who learned that UTA police had failed to report Lisa’s rape to the campus was billed $129 for records that other tax-supported universities give away. And some universities, including UTA, remove not only the names of crime victims and perpetrators but also the location of the crime, further masking facts that would help students and their parents assess the potential danger at that campus.
At Texas Woman’s University in Denton, police reported to the federal government that three students said they were raped between 2001 and 2003. When the university made copies of its actual police reports available for inspection, however, it was clear that TWU had failed to report a fourth case in which a 20-year-old woman was raped by a 21-year-old man who talked his way into her dormitory room in February 2001. The woman reported the crime to police, but police didn’t include the report in the information they gave the department of education.
“It should have been included, but it wasn’t,’’ said Texas Woman’s University public safety director John Erwin. “It was an error.’’
It was not possible to determine how many, if any, of those four rapes were reported on crime logs that TWU students can access, or if crime alerts were issued regarding them. The department made crime logs available only for 2003; records for 2001 and 2002, when the four rapes were reported, have been destroyed.
“My reading of the [Clery] act does not require us to keep the logs themselves for more than one year, so what you saw is all that I have available,’’ Erwin said.
At some private universities, it’s even harder to get an accurate picture of campus crime because many officials maintain that their police reports are not public — despite the fact that they function like small-town police departments, and some are licensed by a state police agency.
The information Baylor gave the federal government under Clery consistently contradicted the information it gave its own campus about rapes, burglaries and assaults. Texas Wesleyan University, which has two campuses in Fort Worth, has yet to respond to an open records request. And when that university finally made its daily logs of crime available for inspection, the records showed Wesleyan had failed to tell students about a rape that occurred in 2001. In stark contrast, TCU police said Tuesday that they would make their offense reports public within a week.
Pete Slover, a board member of the Texas Freedom of Information Foundation and a reporter at The Dallas Morning News, said private universities should be required to turn over the same crime information as public schools. “When the state certifies a police officer at a public university, that cop’s activities are public business. It shouldn’t be any different at a private school: same gun, same badge, same state-issued arrest power,” he said. FOI Foundation president Joel White agreed. “No one would expect police to be able to hide crime records from the public just because they’re at a private school,” he said.
On April 11, 2003, a student at Southern Methodist University told police she had been sexually assaulted in Moore Hall on campus. SMU police never issued a crime alert notifying students about what had happened. Five months later, another SMU student reported being sexually assaulted at the Sigma Chi fraternity house. Once again, campus police failed to issue a campus-wide alert.
The inaction was not unusual. Over the past three years, SMU police have received reports that at least five female students were sexually assaulted on campus. But police issued a campus-wide alert only once, even though the Clery Act requires them to broadcast such notices when crimes occur that are “considered by the institution to represent a threat to students and employees.”
Many SMU students said police should notify them whenever a student is attacked. “The facts need to be made public for the safety of SMU’s female population,” said Davenna Ward, sophomore president of the SMU Resident Hall Association. “If the SMU Police Department is willing to publish reports about other issues that go on at SMU, they should be held accountable for putting this information out as well.”
Michael Snellgrove, SMU police chief since 2003, said his department did the right thing by not notifying students about the sexual assaults. The chief said he did not believe the men who reportedly raped the women in April and September represented a threat to students because in each case the victim knew her attacker. “We don’t necessarily have to put them [campus-wide crime alerts] out for acquaintance rapes, because we recognize who the suspect is,” he said.
Many students and health professionals said this policy makes little sense. They pointed out that in the vast majority of sexual assaults, the victim knows the rapist.
“An acquaintance rape is just as much a crime as anything else,” said Emily Long, a first-year student at SMU. “If more people are informed about this type of crime, they will be able to protect themselves better.”
The U.S. Department of Justice recently released a study showing that as many as one in every four college women will be sexually victimized during their years on campus—and that 90 percent of victims know their attackers.
Snellgrove is unmoved by these facts. But he said his department would immediately issue a campus-wide crime alert if a rape victim did not know her attacker. The SMU police department, he said, has “never put out a campus-wide crime alert for acquaintance rape, but we wouldn’t hesitate if the suspect was a stranger.”
That’s not what happened last year. On Nov. 22, an SMU student reported she was sexually assaulted in a campus parking garage. It was not until four days later — after the SMU student newspaper published a story about the reported rape — that police finally issued a campus-wide crime alert. Many SMU students were outraged by the delay.
Dr. James Caswell, vice president of student affairs, said that in the future, police should issue an electronic alert within 24 hours after a student reports a sexual assault. “It does make sense to alert the campus in this manner,” Caswell said. “In retrospect, I think it [the campus alert] took too long.”
Chief Snellgrove acknowledged that students and faculty want crime information immediately. “The community, regardless of how little information we may have about the case, still wants to know that the crime occurred as soon as possible,” he said. Nevertheless, Snellgrove said the police department will continue to follow his policy of not issuing a crime alert when an acquaintance rape is reported.
Campus security experts said that’s not the best way to protect students.
“The police don’t have to name names. An alert that simply includes the time and location of the crime can raise awareness about the problem,” said Catherine Bath, executive director of Security On Campus, Inc. Alerts “make students safe, by giving them the tools to take precautions. If more students knew that these crimes occurred, they could avoid being victimized.” She said SMU’s policy is inconsistent with the spirit of the Clery Act.
Several SMU students said the police department’s policy of not issuing crime alerts following acquaintance rapes sends the wrong message. “Treating acquaintance rape with less gravity is careless,” said sophomore Lauren Goodson. “Not only would I personally want to know about this crime, but the SMU Police Department should have no hesitation to release a campus-wide alert.”
Last spring, one SMU student had particular reason to be upset over SMU’s crime alert policies. In April, the 19-year-old sophomore was raped by a stranger after leaving an on-campus charity event. About a half hour after she arrived at her home at the nearby Carlyle Apartments, a man entered through a side door and attacked her.
Although she couldn’t identify her rapist, she was convinced he had followed her from SMU. But when she called college police, they told her they could do nothing because the crime had occurred off-campus. SMU police never issued an alert about the sexual assault. Nor was it listed in the department’s daily activity log.
Snellgrove said his department acted properly, because it’s responsible for providing security only inside campus boundaries. “Because the crime did not occur in our jurisdiction, we cannot investigate,” he said. “If there is any way we can help them [the victims] get in touch with the proper authority, we will.”
Carter, of Security on Campus, said the SMU inaction was indefensible and not in line with what many other campuses do.
In a letter to Snellgrove, Carter said, “This incident was reported to you, so this isn’t a situation where the campus police were ignorant of something being handled by another agency. It was in a heavily student-populated area, and may have involved one of your students being targeted on campus and followed to their apartment. Your attitude that there is simply nothing you can do about this type of report is simply pathetic.”
Snellgrove declined to comment on Carter’s letter.
Unlike SMU police, the Carlyle Apartments took action immediately to notify other tenants of the assault, posting notices within 48 hours to alert residents that an “attempted rape” had occurred in the complex.
The young woman remains angry at SMU for its failure to alert students after she was assaulted and for its treatment of her.
“The school couldn’t have cared less,” she said.
The story is very different at the University of Texas at Austin. Unlike SMU, the UT-Austin police department takes a much broader approach to notifying the campus community when a student has been a victim of crime. If a student reports that he or she has been sexually assaulted, whether or not the attacker was an acquaintance, whether on or off campus, UT police issue a campus-wide crime alert. College officials said their policy is designed to follows the letter and spirit of the Clery Act.
In fact, UT went after and got a federal grant for a program called Voices Against Violence that actually resulted in increased reporting of rapes in the UT area. Rapes on or near the UT-Austin campus totaled 24 in 2001, 25 in 2002 and 10 in 2003. But in 2002, thanks to the work of Voices Against Violence, an additional 97 rapes of UT students at other locations were also reported, and a program official said preliminary statistics show that that number increased in 2003.
University officials credit Voices Against Violence with helping convince victims of rape and sexual abuse to come forward, and then providing them with counseling and other resources. UT crime prevention officer William Pieper said the university encourages students to report sexual assaults and gives several presentations each week on the topic.
Unfortunately, the program’s grant was not renewed in 2004, and important parts of its work will end in June as a result. Data on the off-campus rapes (beyond what the Clery Act covers) will no longer be collected; the advocacy work and training of faculty and staff to deal with sexual assault victims will also stop.
“We were shocked” at the funds cut-off, said program coordinator Pamela Cook. Although the Clery Act is valuable, she said, it captures only a fraction of what is happening, especially at a college like UT-Austin, where the vast majority of the students live off-campus. Clery Act statistics “are not a good indicator of what’s going on with our students,” she said. For instance, although the number of rapes reported under Clery went down in 2003, Cook said, early figures indicate that the number of off-campus rapes went up in that year.
Crime of any sort is almost nonexistent at some small Texas campuses. “Honey, we haven’t had so much as a wallet stolen here since I can remember,’’ said one officer at tiny Arlington Baptist College, a four-year Bible school with an enrollment under 200.
Still, at many campuses, crime remains a persistent problem. There were about 300 rapes, 700 robberies, and 1,000 aggravated assaults reported on Texas campuses during the three-year period. Across the state, just nine college-related homicides were reported. But seven of those were reported in one neighborhood near two related community college campuses in Houston. Those same two campuses also reported 10 rapes and hundreds of robberies, assaults, burglaries, and car thefts between 2001 and 2003.
The Houston Community College System encompasses some 37,000 students spread among five main colleges and numerous satellite campuses, including the one at Northline Mall in northeast Houston. At peak hours, more than 1,500 students fill the halls and classrooms in a refurbished department store. The campus is adjacent to low-income housing — and that, campus officials say, is where all the murders were committed that they reported to the U.S. Department of Education, as required by Clery.
Campus officials also claimed to have no information on the identities of those killed or the circumstances of their deaths. Police Chief Louis Duran said the figure his department reported to the federal government came from Houston police, who patrol the high-crime housing development. When Houston police were asked for copies of the offense reports documenting those murders, they said the information the college reported was insufficient to identify the cases.
Duran said his campus is as safe as others located in Houston’s urban high-crime communities. “You need to understand the animal here,’’ he said, “Houston is a violent city and a mecca for parolees.’’
He acknowledged the security problems posed by the porous nature of a community college system with classrooms dotting a major metropolitan area. “Our campuses are wide open to the public,” Duran said. “They’re not controlled campuses like the University of Houston. They’ve got borders. Rice [University], you can’t really go walking through there. Ours is an open institution. Walk, crawl, they’re going to let you in at HCCS.’’
However, he bridled at the suggestion that his system had one of the highest crime rates in the state. “When someone tells you that crime at HCC is high, you better ask ... at U of Houston and TSU, and we’ll compare our on-site stats with their on-site stats.”
(During the same period that HCC’s Northline-area campuses reported seven homicides on nearby public property, the University of Houston’s four campuses reported one and Texas Southern University reported none.)
Some students said they fear for their safety on the Northline campus and that police do a poor job of alerting them to potential dangers. Angelic Azzam attends classes at both the Central and Northline Mall campuses of HCCS. She has no safety concerns at Central, she said, but often worries when she sets foot on Northline. She said she was unaware of the seven homicides.
“It’s kinda scary,’’ she said. “I have to look at my back every once in a while.’’
Another urban school with a crime problem is El Centro College in downtown Dallas, part of the Dallas County Community College System. Most of its classes are held in a nine-story building that looks more like a corporate headquarters than a college campus. It also has more than a dozen satellite campuses that in recent years have included the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas and even the Greyhound bus terminal.
The El Centro web site boasts that it offers “upscale education” at the cheapest tuition rate in the Metroplex. It doesn’t mention that El Centro has one of the highest crime rates among Texas colleges, according to a computer-assisted analysis conducted by UNT and SMU journalism students using crime data submitted by El Centro to the federal government. Between 2001 and 2003, El Centro experienced one crime for every 18 students — and one violent crime for every 55 students. Those crimes included 30 rapes, 110 robberies, 144 aggravated assaults, and 285 burglaries.
El Centro Police Chief Calvin Richard, however, said those statistics are incorrect. He said the actual number of crimes at El Centro was much lower: 6 rapes; 21 robberies; 26 aggravated assaults; 45 burglaries. Richard said he reported the wrong data to federal officials in 2001 and 2002, but they never corrected the errors -- even after he provided them with correct information.
Whatever the actual crime rate, El Centro students said they generally feel safe within the school building and even outside, where many of them wait for DART buses after class and often are approached by panhandlers.
Most of the school’s crime occurs at its satellite campuses. According to Richard’s revised numbers for 2002, the satellite campuses reported 15 aggravated assaults, 15 burglaries, 6 car thefts, and 4 sexual assaults — or 63 percent of all such crime. Federal law requires that school officials report any crimes at these locations if they occur while classes are being held.
Yet, Richard said, his department has never issued an alert for a crime that took place at a satellite campus. Richard said he would issue such an alert if needed, but that he’s never heard of an incident that he believed warranted it. “Would I alert students that there’s a threat in the area? In a heartbeat.” he said.
Jeanne Ann Cleary’s parents would have appreciated such an alert. They were shocked to learn, as they said later, that campus crime was one of “the best-kept secrets in the country.” In fact, until 1988 only 4 percent of colleges and universities reported crime statistics to the FBI, let alone to students and parents. “I knew I had to do something because Jeanne was so precious,” said Connie Clery, Jeanne’s mother. “I had to do something so that others would not suffer through something like this.”
With the help of Texas victims’ rights expert Ann Seymour, the Clerys established Security on Campus, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing crime on college campuses. “When Jeanne died, the role of universities was laissez faire and cover up,” said Connie Clery, who lives in Pennsylvania. “They just didn’t seem to care. What they did seem to care about was their image and keeping enrollment high,”
In 1988, Pennsylvania became the first state to pass legislation that required all colleges and universities to alert their students when campus crime occurred. Howard Clery authored most of the legislation. Security on Campus continued to push for similar legislation in states throughout the country.
“By the time we got to the 12th law passed, I just knew I would never live to go through 50 states, so we decided to press for federal legislation,” Connie Clery said.
“It was extremely difficult because the colleges and universities throughout the whole country fought us tooth and nail, trying to prevent us from getting any of our legislation passed at every bend of the road,” she said. “They were so much more powerful than we were, but what we had was the American public — mothers and fathers and friends who really cared about protecting the kids.”
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the law that eventually has since been amended five times and in 1998 was renamed the Jeanne Clery Act.
Connie Clery said she believes the tide has turned — parents now know to ask questions about crime at their kids’ colleges, and “a good many of the schools” are helping. But much remains to be done.
“I don’t think you will ever be able to have truthful and accurate information until we are sure that all colleges—or the great majority—are really telling the truth,” she said. “At this point, I feel that that is impossible to gauge.”
Editor’s note: Readers wanting information about crime on specific college campuses can find it at http://www.securityoncampus.org/.
This database shows violent and non-violent crimes on more than 100 Texas college campuses and nearby public properties. As part of the “Light of Day’’ project sponsored by the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, the database was compiled by journalism students at Southern Methodist University and the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas, based on information provided by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education./ The SMU team included Megan Connolly, Christine Dao, Farrar Johnson, Pablo Lastra, Jennifer McDowell, and Jessica Savage. At UNT, the team included Shalandys Anderson, Rebecca Ekpe, Jaclyn Gonzales, Christina Jancic, Elizabeth Lee, Lindsay Marshall, Brooke Scoggins, Hannah Seddelmeyer and Taylor Timmins. Fort Worth Weekly intern Brooke Gray also contributed to the effort.
Note that the database has two sets of figures for El Centro in Dallas – one posted on the DOE website that the college says is incorrect and a second that the college says contains the correct information.
If you have questions or comments about the database, contact Dan Malone at dan.malone@fwweekly.com or Craig Flournoy at cflourno@mail.smu.edu. For more information about a particular school, search under Crime Statistics at http://www.securityoncampus.org.
The nation’s leading advocate for campus safety is demanding an investigation into whether Texas universities are violating federal law, following a story last week on how colleges are under-reporting crime. [read more]
Daniel Carter, left, with Clery family members and Security on Campus staffers.
Unsafe and Unreported
A watchdog wants an investigation into college crime dangers.
By University of North Texas Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism
Ft. Worth Weekly
Dec. 8, 2004
Editor´s note: This story was reported and written by University of North Texas Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism students Shalandys Anderson, Rebecca Ekpe, Jaclyn Gonzales, Christina Jancic, Elizabeth Lee, Lindsay Marshall, Brooke Scoggins, Hannah Seddelmeyer, and Taylor Timmins.
The nation’s leading advocate for campus safety is demanding an investigation into whether Texas universities are violating federal law, following a story last week on how colleges are under-reporting crime.
In an e-mail to state and federal education officials, S. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security On Campus, said Fort Worth Weekly’s article (“Campus Insecurity”) revealed “serious violations of the Jeanne Clery Act’s campus crime reporting requirements across the state of Texas. At many colleges and universities, key provisions of the law appear to be completely ignored, crimes as serious as rape are minimized as lesser offenses, and statistics are misreported.’’
Security On Campus is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving campus safety. The driving forces behind both the organization and the federal disclosure law are Connie and Howard Clery, whose daughter Jeanne was raped and murdered in her Pennsylvania dormitory room 18 years ago.
Carter urged the U.S. Department of Education, the agency responsible for enforcing the Clery Act, to take whatever steps are necessary, including the imposition of fines up to $27,500 for each violation, to enforce the law.
The story that prompted Carter’s call for an investigation was reported by UNT and SMU journalism students. The “Light of Day’’ project, sponsored by the Freedom of Information Foundation of Dallas, was designed to assist students in obtaining and using public records. The Clery Act requires colleges to compile crime statistics, publish a daily log of criminal activity, and issue campus crime alerts.
The report by the journalism students uncovered widespread failure to comply with that law. SMU reported one rape as an illness and failed to issue warnings about four others. Baylor provided information to students that did not match up to what it reported to the federal government. The University of Texas at Arlington failed to issue crime alerts for two on-campus rapes and misidentified both on daily crime logs as mere “assaults’’ instead of “sexual assaults.’’ And Texas Woman’s University destroyed daily crime logs for 2001 and 2002.
Problems at TWU, apparently, are continuing. Senior Carol Noack-Davidson said that she provided campus police with a detailed description of a man who stabbed her in the chest last week while she was cleaning her car on campus. The police issued a crime alert as required, but Davidson said the report contained so many errors that it was of little value. When she called the errors to the attention of police, she said, she was told that the department wasn’t going to change the alerts to correct a few details with just two weeks remaining in the fall semester.
TWU public safety director John Erwin acknowledged that the alert wasn’t as the student “wanted it to be,” but that it was designed to “bring in the most suspects.’’
Butch Oxendine, executive director of the American Student Government Association, said colleges owe their students an honest accounting of campus crime information even when it puts the schools in a bad light.
“I know that schools typically want to put up a good face to the public,” he said. “They want to downplay the negative things. That’s why these laws exist. Are all the schools conforming? No. By reporting this, you all are holding their feet to the fire. That’s very valuable.”
In his e-mail, Carter said the Clery Act’s goal of making college campuses safe won’t be met until the government forces universities to take it seriously. “When institutions violate the Clery Act in the way detailed in this article, students are denied the information they need to protect themselves,’’ Carter wrote, “and the whole intent and spirit of the law are undercut, rendering it ineffective.”
In addition to the federal education department, Carter sent his Dec. 1 complaint to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, one of the Clery legislation’s sponsors.
Specter’s office did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the coordinating board said the state agency lacks power to enforce the federal law. And a Department of Education Official said the agency could not publicly comment on the request until it has officially responded to Carter — whenever that might be.
“If Security on Campus files a complaint, they are the complainant. We must respond to that first,’’ said Stephanie Babyak, a spokesperson for Charles Johnson, the Dallas DOE official who oversees Clery Act enforcement issues in Texas.
Some version of what is now known as the Clery Act, which covers virtually every U.S. college or university, has been on the books since 1900. Violations appear to be widespread across the nation, and enforcement appears to be lax.
For example, 23 of 25 colleges audited in 1997 by the U.S. General Accounting Office failed to properly report rapes, assaults, and other crimes, according to a USA Today story published in 2000. That same article also said that the Department of Education found problems “with nearly every one’’ of more than 100 college crime reports examined. The violations ranged from a campus in Florida that failed to report 35 rapes to one in Pennsylvania that hid information about more than 100 robberies — exactly the kind of dangerous actions that the act is intended to prevent.
Although the Clery Act carries a potential fine of up to $27,500 per violation, fines are rare. In 2000, Mount St. Clare College, a Catholic school in Iowa, was fined $25,000 after an investigation revealed that it had failed to report four burglaries, three assaults, two rapes, and one liquor law violation during the mid-1990s. The school, now known as The Franciscan University of the Prairies, however, was able to reduce the fine by $10,000 on appeal.
In May 2004, the Department of Education assessed a $250,000 fine against Salem International University in West Virginia. Investigators said the school failed to report five rapes and hate crimes, failed to issue crime alerts, and under-reported crimes. Salem officials have said they intend to appeal the fines.
Going after small, little-known private schools is one thing. Whether the Department of Education will level stiff fines against the large state universities and affluent private colleges named in the Fort Worth Weekly report remains to be seen.
A Department of Education official told Carter in an e-mail Monday that the agency would investigate his complaint and “take action, as appropriate, to ensure compliance with the law.”
In his letter, Carter urged the department to take “strong action’’ against colleges who violate the law. “The effectiveness of this law has been harmed greatly by lax compliance, and enforcement,’’ he added in an e-mail interview. “Lax enforcement ... has led to students being needlessly put at greater risk of crime victimization than they should have been.”
To access a database of violent and non-violent crime on and around Texas college campuses, go to www.fwweekly.com/issues/2004-12-01/feature.asp and scroll to the bottom of the story.
The University of North Texas police department´s lack of reporting sexual assaults to the local community make the campus look safer than some believe it actually is. This is due to problematic wording the federal law that requires colleges to disclose campus crime information and issue alerts when students are in danger. [read more]
Taylor Timmons
UNT issued no alert to students when a rape was reported at this fraternity house. Police investigated, but no one was prosecuted.
A Fine Line
At UNT, fewer crime alerts don’t mean less danger.
By Taylor Timmins
Ft. Worth Weekly
Apr. 6, 2005
The two rapes were reported in locations barely 60 feet apart, one in a University of North Texas fraternity house, the other in an apartment across the small parking lot. But as far as federal campus-crime reporting law is concerned, the second rape complaint might as well have happened in another country.
Because the first sexual assault case was reported to have happened in a frat house, it was investigated by campus police, reported to the federal government, and ultimately disclosed to students. But students were never told about the second alleged rape, no less brutal, because it was investigated by Denton police and not campus cops.
Problematic wording of the Clery Act, the federal law that requires colleges to disclose campus crime information and issue alerts when students are in danger, let UNT ignore the second rape — and many other crimes that happened right on the edge of its campus. But UNT also has failed to issue crime alerts on five other reported rapes since 2001 — crimes that the college did report to the federal government — because college officials decided that the perpetrators of those “date rapes” posed no danger to other students.
The university’s handling of those sexual assault alerts, though legal, made the campus look safer than some believe it is.
Chris Lippincott, a spokesman for the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, said it makes little sense to treat acquaintance rapes as less dangerous than other sexual assaults. “When people think of the word ‘rapist,’ it conjures up an image of a man in a ski mask wielding a gun, hiding in a parking lot,’’ he said. And yet “three-fourths of all sexual assaults are date or acquaintance rapes, and the weapon used is trust.”
“Declaring that there is no need to report date rapes will dramatically reduce the number of assaults in the [annual] reports,” he said. It’s “a dangerous way to cut those numbers. Those assaults are serious crimes. If a student were killed by his or her roommate or classmate, the university would be required to report it as a violent crime. That the attacker was known shouldn’t undercut the value of the crime. The public ought to know about it.’’
UNT police acknowledge they do not issue crime alerts for every rape. In some cases, police said, they decided the accused assailant posed no threat to anyone other than his accuser. In other cases, they said they didn’t find out about the assault allegations until long after they were reported to others. In 2001, for example, two of the four rapes UNT reported to the federal government were reported to student housing authorities but not to police. Campus police didn’t learn of them until the end of the year when they prepared their report for Clery.
“Our department had no information regarding these two alleged sexual assaults other than the fact that they were reported to [student housing],’’ said UNT police Chief Ed Reynolds. “It was made clear the victim did not want to report the incident. Therefore, we had nothing to investigate.’’
One rape allegation that UNT police did investigate was reported on Sept. 13, 2002, at the Phi Kappa Sigma house at 919 Maple St. A woman attending a frat party told police that a pledge asked her to help him find something in a laundry room. Once inside, the man began fondling the woman. When she resisted, she said, he threw her around, pinned her to a washing machine, stripped her pants off, and assaulted her. Another fraternity member heard the woman’s screams and helped the woman kick her assailant off. According to police records, when the frat house Good Samaritan asked the other student what he was doing, he responded: “Nothing. She wanted it.’’
Though police investigated that assault and included it in the required statistical report and on a daily crime log available for students to inspect, they did not issue a crime alert warning the campus about a possible sexual predator. Records released by UNT police did not clearly state whether there had been an arrest or a charge filed in the case, but listed it as having been “cleared by other means.” That phrase can mean many things, but it indicates that there was no conviction.
“We are required to evaluate each case individually on its merits to determine whether a notice should be issued. As required by Clery, the institution issues timely warnings when the crime represents a serious or continuing threat to students and employees,” Reynolds said. Despite the fact that no alerts were issued in connection with date rape complaints, the police chief said that the university believes such assaults are dangerous offenses. He did not respond to phone calls and e-mails requesting comment on how police determined that none of the acquaintance rape allegations merited campus-wide alerts.
Two years after the frat-house report, in an apartment at 910 W. Eagle St., about a block from campus, another young woman reported that she had been raped three times in her bedroom by a former North Texas student after a night of partying. But this time, Denton police, instead of the campus cops, responded to the call. Denton police said they referred the case to the district attorney’s office, and that the grand jury subsequently returned a no-bill.
That incident was one of scores of violent crimes reported on the periphery of the UNT campus that were never made public by university officials because they took place on private property. Reynolds said he knew nothing about the rape complaint in the apartment complex near the frat house until told by a reporter.
Denton police records, obtained under Texas public information laws, show that at least one murder, four sexual assaults, seven aggravated assaults, and four robberies have taken place since 2001 within a block of UNT’s campus — all crimes that, since they happened outside campus boundaries, students were never alerted to.
The Clery Act, named after a Lehigh University student who was raped and killed in her dormitory room in 1986, requires all colleges and universities that receive federal funds to publicly chronicle — in daily logs, alerts, and statistical reports — crimes that occur on campus, in adjacent public areas and on some non-campus properties such as fraternity and sorority houses. But crimes that take place on other private property — even if it is adjacent to the university and used primarily by students — are not required to be reported under the act.
Universities that violate the law can be fined up to $27,500 per incident, but such fines are rare. However, after UNT and SMU investigative journalism students in December reported on widespread under-reporting of campus crimes (“Insecurity on Campus,” Dec. 1, 2004), a federal education official promised an investigation. Officials at several Texas universities said they have not heard of any action being taken in connection with such an investigation; several other colleges did not return reporters’ phone calls.
Although the Clery Act requires universities to alert students to dangers, vague language in the law allows universities great latitude in deciding what crimes pose a threat. In this case, by strictly interpreting the law, UNT has able to reduce the total number of sexual assaults included in its annual reports by nearly a third since 2001.
“Establishing a practical, universal definition for the greater campus community has proven difficult, especially given the differences between schools’’ said S. Daniel Carter, the senior vice president of Security On Campus, the nonprofit organization founded by Jeanne Clery’s parents. “It would probably be difficult to even get people in a single campus community to agree on exactly what should be covered, much less to determine how to compare schools in different types of environments.’’
Still, some colleges go out of their way to report crime that occurs in areas around their campuses, even when not required to by law. The Houston Community College System’s Northline Mall campus, for example, included seven homicides in its annual crime reports, despite the fact that all of the crimes occurred in low-income housing adjacent to the campus. Had the college adhered strictly to the Clery Act requirements, it could have omitted this information from its report.
Lippincott said he recognizes that universities fear being branded as unsafe, but stresses that departments must improve their reporting of rape cases.
“Sexual assault is a very serious problem that campuses must deal with,” he said. “The key to confronting and reducing the violence is to acknowledge that the problem exists. Burying the problem under a pile of technicalities does not advance the ball.”
Taylor Timmins, a student at the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas, can be reached at ttimmins@gmail.com. This story is part of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas’ “Light of Day” project.
University of Texas at Arlington officials did not report a rape case to the local community, and then gave the accused assailant a job as a resident advisor in the same dormitory in which he was accused of committing the crime. [read more]
Sleeping with the Enemy?
UTA defends giving a student accused of rape a job — on campus.
By Hannah Seddlemeyer
Ft. Worth Weekly
Apr. 20, 2005
When a student at the University of Texas at Arlington told police that she had been raped and beaten unconscious by another student in May 2003, college officials took action. First, they determined that the reported attack didn’t indicate any other students might be in danger, and therefore declined to issue a public warning about a possible predator prowling the campus. And two weeks later — as the complaint was making its way to a grand jury to be investigated — they gave the alleged attacker a job as a resident assistant in the very dorm in which he had been accused of attacking the young woman.
The man, according to records obtained under the Texas Public Information Act, worked as a resident assistant (RA) for a year before the Tarrant County grand jury decided to take no action against him.
Despite the fact that the man was never arrested, charged, or prosecuted, questions remain about why the university would have put a person accused of a violent crime into a position of authority over other students.
UTA officials have defended their handling of the case, saying they don’t generally issue crime alerts when the accuser knows the accused and that their investigation discredited the allegation.
UTA police said after they investigated the incident and concluded it wasn’t “clear cut,” the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office also passed on the case, then referred the complaint to a grand jury for further review.
“When the district attorney’s office has a case that is not a clear-cut offense, they will put the case before a grand jury for them to hear all the facts, talk with the parties involved, and they then make a determination to issue an indictment or not,” said James Ferguson, UTA’s interim police chief. “The grand jury can also request additional investigative information before making a determination.”
Another UTA official defended the decision to hire the student as a paid mentor to other dorm residents even while he was under investigation.
“As a result of our investigations, it was clearly evident that the incident was not a sexual assault,” said John Hall, vice president for administration and campus operations at UTA. “We certainly would not have hired someone as an RA if we had any uncertainty concerning the incident in question.”
A former resident assistant who is familiar with this incident, as well as other rapes reported on campus, said that some sexual predators will deliberately befriend naďve students. Predators know, the former RA said, that a complaint filed by an acquaintance is handled as a date rape, with little or no consequences.
The student was accused of rape on May 4, 2003, and hired, according to UTA, as a resident assistant May 21, but the grand jury didn’t decide to close its investigation until slightly more than a year later — on May 28, 2004. Fort Worth Weekly reported in December 2004 that UTA officials had declined to issue a campus crime alert after the student reported she had been assaulted. The story, written by University of North Texas and Southern Methodist University journalism students as part of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas’ Light of Day project, documented apparent widespread failure by Texas colleges to comply with a federal campus crime law. The Jeanne Clery Act requires campus police to publicly disclose crime information and issue alerts when students are in danger. As a result of the story, the U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation that is still going on.
It’s not clear what happened in the woman’s dorm room on the night in question. Neither the accused nor the accuser could be reached for comment. It’s also not clear from the available public records and interviews with UTA officials what caused law enforcement and a grand jury to question the woman’s account of the incident.
The student told campus police that her acquaintance, a fellow student she had met that semester, sexually assaulted her and knocked her unconscious after walking her home from a party at which she had been drinking. UTA police decided, as they have in similar cases, not to issue a campus-wide crime alert about the reported rape, apparently because the alleged attacker was known to the woman.
Under that criterion, according to rape crisis officials, UTA officials would decline to issue alerts in almost all rapes. Numerous studies show that most rapists do know their victims. Deborah Gardner of Women’s Center of Tarrant County said that 90 percent of women who are raped between the ages of 14 and 24 are assaulted by an acquaintance. Overall, 60 percent of all reported rape cases are acquaintance rapes.
“False reports of rape are rare,” Gardner said. Prosecution is sometimes made more difficult, she said, when drugs or alcohol were involved.
About 30 RAs live in five dorms on the UTA campus and serve as mentors and problem-solvers for other dormitory residents. They are paid about $90 a week, plus meals.
The Weekly filed an open record request with the Tarrant County district attorney’s office for records that would show the disposition of the woman’s complaint. Assistant district attorney Ashley Fourt responded with a letter saying no charge was filed in the case. “The Tarrant County grand jury merely conducted an investigation of the incident and on May 28, 2004, concluded that no further action be taken,” she wrote.
Why it took the grand jury a year to dismiss the allegation is not clear. Amy Cullum, the assistant district attorney who presented the case to the grand jury, said she could not comment about the specifics of the investigation. But grand juries, she said, sometimes take a case on “direct review” after a complaint, but no arrest, is made.
Hall would not comment on the former RA’s claim that some predators work by befriending students before assaulting them so their complaints would be treated as acquaintance rapes not subject to campus crime alerts.
The former RA said: “They know a flyer won’t be posted about them. These people know the system. They don’t want to get caught. Befriending [potential victims] is the best way to not get caught.”
Hannah Seddelmeyer can be reached at hannah.seddelmeyer@gmail.com. Christina Jancic contributed to this report. Both are students at the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas.
The discrepancies between how federal laws and The Clery Act are interpreted by police and campus security departments at public and private colleges means that students of private institutions, such as Texas Christian University, are less aware of campus crime than their public school counterparts. [read more]
Wicklund: ’It creates this barrier between the students and the police that makes it hard to know and report the full truth.’
Pricier, But Not Safer
Students and open-records supporters say private colleges shouldn’t keep crime data secret.
By Anna Camp
Ft. Worth Weekly
Aug. 3, 2005
It’s a paradox that leaves Gabe Wicklund frustrated and worried — not only as a journalist but also as a potential crime victim. Wicklund figures she and her fellow Frogs are paying lots more in tuition and fees at TCU than they would at a state university, but that they know far less than public-college students about potentially dangerous crime on their campus.
Wicklund, the former news editor and next editor-in-chief for the TCU Daily Skiff, has struggled and watched other Skiff staffers struggle for two years with attempts to get information on campus crimes from TCU police. Like all other universities, public or private, that participate in federal student aid programs, TCU police are required by a federal law called the Clery Act to provide some information to the public — mainly crime logs with bare-bones information, campus-wide alerts in certain situations, and statistical information sent to the federal Department of Education. The act was passed specifically to remedy the refusal of many colleges to level with students and their families about the incidence of crime — in some cases including brutal murders and rapes — on their campuses.
However, the information that the Clery Act makes available is much less than what police departments at public universities, which are covered by state and federal open-records laws, are required to provide. And the difference is one that some critics believe should be challenged. If a police agency, even on a private university campus, enforces public law using state-licensed police officers and state-granted police powers, they reason, that agency should be subject to the same open-records laws.
“The fact that our police departments can keep crime on our campus private gives them more leverage ... and they can pick and choose what they tell us,” Wicklund said. “It creates this barrier between the students and the police that makes it hard to know and report the full truth.” It also produces an atmosphere void of openness and trust, she said, created by the very department that should be upholding those values.
Attorney David Donaldson of Austin, a board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, said attention has been drawn to the situation by recent news stories, in Fort Worth Weekly and elsewhere, about widespread failures of Texas colleges to fully comply with the Clery Act, and about how campus police departments’ interpretations of the law have left students, for instance, with no information about date-rape attacks or high-crime areas on the edges of some campuses.
Recent court rulings in several states have also highlighted the lower level of public accountability required of campus police departments. In cases filed in Georgia, New York, Massachusetts, and Indiana, judges have repeatedly said that, under current law in those states, police records at private universities are private. In Texas, private-college police departments are allowed to withhold all details of crime information not required to be released by the Clery Act.
In some states — though not in Texas — the result of the rulings and press coverage has been the filing of legislation to bring college police departments more in line with other police agencies on public release of crime information. Open-records expert Carolyn S. Carlson, former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and chair of SPJ’s subcommittee on campus crime, said she believes Georgia will pass a law in the 2006 legislative session to define campus police records as public documents. A similar proposal was approved unanimously this year by a Georgia legislative committee but didn’t make it to full approval before the end of the session. If the bill passes, Carlson said, “I’m hopeful it will spread to other states and across the country.” Many states are beginning to realize that all police agencies need to be held to the same standards, she said.
A survey by the Weekly of large private universities in Texas showed wide disparities in public-records policies — and thus in what information students and their families receive about campus crime.
The Weekly sent letters to police departments at 11 schools, requesting information on sexual assault crimes on those campuses. The information requested went beyond what the schools are required to report under the Clery Act. Only one college, Abilene Christian University, released the same kind of information that public universities would be required to disclose.
Three other universities — Hardin-Simmons, Lubbock Christian, and Fort Worth’s Texas Wesleyan University — replied that they had no sexual assault reports to release. Austin’s St. Edward’s University denied the request but also asked Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott for a ruling on the issue. The other six — TCU, SMU, Baylor, Rice, and St. Mary’s and Trinity colleges in San Antonio — refused to release any records.
Most of the last group replied promptly to the Weekly’s request; TCU wavered. When approached by a student for information on sexual assault cases, TCU officials provided some of the requested records. “We try to meet anybody’s request for information,” one official told student journalist Melissa Christensen. “We don’t withhold information.” However, many of the reports Christensen had requested (on behalf of the Weekly’s investigation) were missing.
When the newspaper requested information on such crimes directly, TCU police refused. The college’s attorneys wrote that the university is not subject to the Texas Open Records Act; they cited a 1993 ruling by the state attorney general that said the hiring of security officers by a private college “does not make the campus police department a governmental body.”
The sole open-records test in Texas is whether the university police department accepts public funds, said attorney Joel White, president of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
Carlson said this gap in the law is absurd. “It’s dangerous [to have] private police forces acting with all the power of public forces but behind closed doors,” the SPJ leader said. Police forces that are performing public functions should be treated equally by the law, she said. “If university police departments have the power to arrest, charge, and detain, it only makes sense that they have the same responsibilities as public police.”
Allowing an agency that exercises police powers to avoid public scrutiny is very dangerous in a democratic society, Carlson said. “We’ve decided in this country that open government is the best government,” she said. “I think this same principle flows right down to our schools. ... This shouldn’t be an issue of whose money is paying their salary, it should be an issue of what functions they’re performing.”
Donaldson, the FOI Foundation board member, said that requiring private university police departments to comply with open-records laws would not be a great burden. They would simply have to be more open with the information they already have, he said.
At Abilene Christian, Police Chief Jimmy Ellison said in a letter that his department released some of the information the Weekly requested, even though it didn’t have to under law, “in cooperative concern regarding campus crime, safety and awareness issues.”
Ellison said awareness is a valuable tool in fighting campus crime. “Just because the institution that we serve is a private university, I feel it would be unfair for us to provide any less service or awareness than our counterparts at public universities,” he wrote. He said his department works hard to overcome the image of some campus police departments, especially at private universities, that hide information or fail to properly investigate crimes. “Certainly no police department is perfect, but we try to do a good job for everyone and keep the 5,000 sons and daughters entrusted to us as safe as possible,” Ellison wrote. The availability of crime records is one factor in the safety equation, he said.
Wicklund said she’s encouraged by the legislation in Georgia that would change the situation, even if it’s not happening in Texas yet. “It’s important that they keep forcing police to be open with their records,” she said. “We have a right to know when and where and why something happened — we want the full story.”
Until the law is changed, Wicklund said, she and her staff at the Skiff will continue to have to work harder to get less information for crime stories than their student-journalist counterparts at public universities.
“We do half our job as journalists when we don’t have all the information that we could if we were allowed to see the police reports like at public schools,” Wicklund said, “and in turn, the student body is short-changed, and it perpetuates the secrecy that surrounds crime on these campuses.”
Kristi Walker, a recent TCU graduate, believes private schools would do a service to their students if they released more extensive crime reports. She said she was sexually harassed on campus, and she’s outraged that the law does not require private university police departments to make crime records, especially rape reports, available to the public. The self-defense classes TCU offers aren’t enough, Walker said — students have to be mentally prepared to confront crime. “The information police have could help keep us alert,” she said, “and help students remember that those things can and do happen on college campuses — even private ones.”
The head of a national organization that monitors crime on college campuses said Thursday the SMU Police Department’s failure last April to tell students a female student had been raped at a nearby apartment complex was “pathetic.” [read more]
Addressing rape
By Jessica Savage
SMU Daily Campus
Nov. 19, 2004
The head of a national organization that monitors crime on college campuses said Thursday the SMU Police Department’s failure last April to tell students a female student had been raped at a nearby apartment complex was “pathetic.”
In a letter to SMU Police Chief Michael Snellgrove, S. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security on Campus, Inc., said, “This incident was reported to you, so this isn’t a situation where the campus police were ignorant of something being handled by another agency. It was in a heavily student-populated area, and may have involved one of your students being targeted on campus and followed to their apartment. Your attitude that there is simply nothing you can do about this type of report is simply pathetic.”
Snellgrove declined to comment.
In a story published Thursday, The Daily Campus reported that campus police failed to inform students that an SMU student was raped in an apartment complex near SMU in April. In the story, Snellgrove defended the decision. He said his department is responsible for providing security inside the campus boundaries.
The story quoted another Security on Campus official as saying the federal Clery Act requires campus police to inform students about sexual assaults. However, in a separate letter, Carter said this statement is “quoted out of context” and is not correct.
Nevertheless, in his letter to Snellgrove, Carter said SMU police should have promptly notified other students that a sexual assault had been reported.
“While apparently not strictly a violation of the federal Jeanne Clery Act, the failure of the SMU Police Department to fully log a rape reported by a student at her off campus apartment on April 17 is extremely disappointing as is your failure to issue a timely warning,” Carter told Snellgrove.
Carter said many other schools have realized they should issue warnings whenever violent crimes occur involving students.
Security on Campus is a non-profit organization that monitors campus police compliance with federal reporting requirements.
Campuswide alerts not issued after attacks. [read more]
Graphic by Brian Fox
Police fail to report rapes
Campuswide alerts not issued after attacks
By Jennifer McDowell and Megan Connolly
SMU Daily Campus
Nov. 18, 2004
On Sept. 14, 2003, an SMU student told campus police she was sexually assaulted at a fraternity house.
However, the SMU Police Department did not issue a campuswide crime alert notifying students of what happened.
The inaction was not unusual. Over the past three years, SMU police have received reports that at least five female students were sexually assaulted on campus, police records show.
Despite the warnings, police never issued campuswide crime alerts for four of the assaults, even though a federal law requires them to issue notices when crimes “considered by the institution to represent a threat to students and employees” occur.
Several SMU students said the police should notify students whenever a student is attacked.
“The facts need to be made public for the safety of SMU’s female population,” said Davenna Ward, sophomore president of the SMU Resident Hall Association.
“If the SMU Police Department is willing to publish reports about other issues that go on at SMU, they should be held accountable for putting this information out as well.”
Michael Snellgrove, the SMU police chief since 2003, initially said in an interview that his department should always issue a warning whenever a rape is reported.
“We have to put out a timely warning when there’s a sexual assault reported,” he said.
However, Snellgrove gave a different explanation when asked why his department did not issue crime alerts following several sexual assaults in 2003. Snellgrove said that in those cases he did not believe the attackers represented a threat to students.
Snellgrove said that in all but one case, the victim knew the attacker.
“We don’t necessarily have to put them [campuswide crime alerts] out for acquaintance rapes because we recognize who the suspect is,” he said.
Many students and health professionals said this policy makes little sense. They pointed out that in the vast majority of sexual assaults, the victim knows the rapist.
“An acquaintance rape is just as much a crime as anything else,” said Emily Long, a first-year at SMU. “If more people are informed about this type of crime they will be able to protect themselves better.”
The U.S. Department of Justice recently released a study showing that as many as one in every four college women will be sexually victimized during her years in college. In 90 percent of these cases, the victim will know her offender, the study found.
Snellgrove is unmoved by these facts. He said the police department made the right decision not to issue a campuswide crime alert each time a student reported being raped by someone she knew.
The SMU police department, he said, has “never put out a campuswide crime alert for acquaintance rape, but we wouldn’t hesitate if the suspect was a stranger.”
That is not what happened in Nov. 2003. On Saturday, Nov. 23, a student reported she was sexually assaulted in the Airline Parking Garage. It was not until four days later — after The Daily Campus published a story about the reported rape — that SMU police finally issued a campuswide crime alert.
SMU students were quick to criticize the police department’s delay in issuing a warning. University administration agreed with the students.
After the most recent sexual assault, Dr. Jim Caswell, dean of Student Affairs, said in the future, police should issue an electronic alert sent out within 24 hours after a student reports a sexual assault.
“It does make sense to alert the campus in this manner,” Caswell said in April. “In retrospect, I think it [the campus alert] took too long.”
Snellgrove said students and faculty want crime information immediately.
“The community, regardless of how little information we may have about the case, still wants to know that the crime occurred as soon as possible,” he said recently.
Nevertheless, Snellgrove said the police department will continue to follow his policy of not issuing a crime alert when an acquaintance rape is reported.
Campus security experts said this is not the best way to protect students.
“The police don’t have to name names. An alert that simply includes the time and location of the crime can raise awareness about the problem,” says Katherine Bath, executive director of Security on Campus, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving safety on college campuses.
“[Alerts] make students safe by giving them the tools to take precautions. If more students knew that these crimes occurred, they could avoid being victimized.”
Bath said SMU’s policy is inconsistent with the spirit of the Clery Act, a federal law that requires schools to report violent crimes to the government and the students.
Several SMU students said the police department’s policy of not issuing crime alerts when an acquaintance rape takes place sends the wrong message.
“Treating acquaintance rape with less gravity is careless,” said Lauren Goodson, a sophomore. “Not only would I personally want to know about this crime, but the SMU Police Department should have no hesitation to release a campuswide alert.”
Assaults reported by SMU PD
Between 2001 and 2003, four female students at SMU told police they were sexually assaulted on campus. Yet police never issued campuswide crime alerts despite a federal law requiring them to do so. Daily activity logs maintained by police show:
- Aug. 22, 2001: Medical City Hospital contacted SMU PD and advised that a female student arrived at the ER and reported she was sexually assaulted on campus.
- June 30, 2002: A student reported she was sexually assaulted. The incident apparently occurred in early February in Morrison Hall.
- April 11, 2003: A student reported she was the victim of sexual assault. The offense occurred inside Moore Hall early in the morning. The victim knew the suspect who was a former student.
- Sept. 14, 2003: A student reported she was sexually assaulted at the Sigma Chi house on the previous day. The victim declined to file criminal charges at the time of the report.
Off-campus assault not in police briefs. [read more]
Graphic by Brian Fox
Police fail to report rapes
Off-campus assault not in police briefs
By Jessica Savage
SMU Daily Campus
Nov. 18, 2004
Last April, Linda, then an SMU sophomore, was raped.
The assault took place in her apartment complex near SMU shortly after she left a campus fundraising event.
Linda, who asked to remain anonymous, was convinced the rapist followed her from SMU to her apartment. She decided to alert SMU authorities of that possibility.
But Linda said SMU officials displayed little interest.
“The school could have cared less,” she said.
SMU officials declined to comment on the rape. But they said they handled it in a proper manner.
SMU Police Chief Michael Snellgrove said his department is responsible for providing security inside the campus boundaries. Anything that occurs outside those boundaries is the responsibility of someone else, according to Snellgrove.
“Because the crime did not occur in our jurisdiction, we cannot investigate,” he said. “If there is any way we can help them [the victims] get in touch with the proper authority, we will.”
An expert on campus crime and federal law said Snellgrove is wrong.
Sarah Wood, program director for Security on Campus, which monitors campus police compliance with federal reporting requirements, said SMU police are required to inform students about what happened to Linda.
“If a crime is reported to campus police, they must report it under [a category known as] ‘off campus crimes’ and make it available on their daily crime log,” said Wood. “In the spirit of the Clery Act, they should make their students aware of crimes that affect students on and off campus.”
The federal Clery Act requires public and private universities to report annual crime statistics, maintain a daily crime log and issue timely warnings.
It is named in memory of Jeanne Ann Clery, a college freshman at Lehigh University, who was raped and murdered while asleep in her residence hall on April 5, 1986.
To date, SMU police have never informed students about what happened to Linda. In fact, she said the report, posted online by the police, does not mention the rape.
That report states, “040605 3:15 p.m.: A student reported an incident that occurred off campus. She will be referred to the Health Center for assistance. Closed.”
Linda said the case number matches the time and day she contacted SMU police.
Unlike SMU police, officials at the apartment complex where Linda was raped, took action immediately to notify other tenants of the assault. Linda said officials at The Carlyle posted notices within 48 hours alerting residences that an “attempted rape” occurred in the complex. A spokesperson for the Carlyle, owned by Equity Residential, declined to comment.
The failure of SMU police to inform the SMU community about Linda’s rape is not an isolated incident. In Nov. 2003, an SMU student said she was drugged in Fondren Library and then sexually assaulted in the Airline parking garage. However, SMU police did not issue a campus alert until four days later, after The Daily Campus had reported her sexual assault. And for several months, the police described the student as ill and made no mention of the sexual assault.
Linda’s story
On April 16, SMU hosted its first annual Relay for Life event, which benefited the American Cancer Society. Linda and her team raised several hundred dollars. In return, they participated in a walk/run around The Boulevard and enjoyed the festivities and food. At about 4 a.m. on April 17, Linda traded places with one of her teammates, said goodbye, drove home to The Carlyle and entered her apartment. Thirty minutes later, an older man came in through the side door. It was then, she said, that the unimaginable happened. “He raped me and left,” said Linda, stealing her house and cellular phones. Unable to call for help, Linda drove to her sister’s apartment and called Dallas police. Linda and her sister then went to Parkland Memorial Hospital. She underwent a series of tests provided by the Parkland Rape Crisis Center. Hours later, a Dallas police detective arrived to question Linda. Afterwards, she and the detective returned to her bedroom to collect more evidence. “The detective took all my bedding for testing. They got DNA, but no prints,” said Linda. Linda contacted her parents, who insisted she notify SMU. Linda called SMU police to inform them of the possibility that she might have been followed from campus to her apartment. They told her nothing could be done since the crime occurred off campus. Reflecting back on that night, Linda is certain that someone was watching her from the time she arrived home until the moment he entered her apartment. “He knew I was alone,” said Linda. Linda was unable to identify the man who raped her. Authorities had hoped to identify him through DNA testing, but have so far been unsuccessful. Her attacker is not a registered sex offender. “Basically, they [the police] are waiting for him to slip up,” said Linda. The case remains open. Linda also remains angry at SMU and its failure to alert students after she was assaulted. “I now know why people don’t report these things because it takes forever,” she said. “I will be dealing with this for the next three or four years.”A resident of an apartment complex near the University of Texas at Dallas commits sexual assault, admits it to the police, and then is permitted to continue living in his apartment until the end of the semester without the crime being reported to the local community. [read more]
Security is "heavily enforced" at Waterview Park? That depends on your notion of "heavily." It didn´t seem too heavy for Prathap Rajamani, right, who was allowed to stay at Waterview after admitting he raped a fellow student.
The Dorm From Hell
Black mold, broken toilets and leaking ceilings can make life miserable at UTD's Waterview Park. Then there's the crime.
The Dallas Observer
Apr. 28, 2005
Editor’s note: This story was reported, written and edited by a team of student journalists at Universuty of Texas at Dallas: Scott Anderson, Genevieve Barr, Alicia Booker, Kelsey Guy, Cecilia Lai, Regan Cumming, Allison Denman, Julie Derham, Hill Fischer, Ariel Hammond, Kristen Mosteller, Teresa Nguyen, Austin Payne, Kristin Weber and Kindal Wright.
Prathap Rajamani had been looking forward to this day. The chemical he´d ordered online had just arrived.
Chloroform, a colorless liquid with a slightly sweet taste, is used today to produce Freon. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was used as an anesthetic. That fit Rajamani´s plans perfectly.
Rajamani, a native of India, was a 22-year-old graduate student majoring in software engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. He´d arrived at the school in August 2004 and lived in UTD´s Waterview Park, a sprawling complex of more than 1,200 apartments and the largest private dormitory in Texas. Now, on the evening of November 18, he planned to meet with another UTD student we´ll call Amy. She and Rajamani shared two classes, and Amy considered him a friend. She´d invited Rajamani to her Waterview apartment to study that night.
He had other intentions.
The two began studying in Amy´s living room. Some time after 5 p.m., Amy went to check on clothes she was washing. While she was gone, Rajamani pulled out a bottle of chloroform he´d hidden in his pocket and poured it on a white handkerchief. When Amy returned and sat down on the sofa, Rajamani grabbed her and squeezed the handkerchief against her nose and mouth. She fought hard, but Rajamani held the cloth tight for about 10 seconds even as it became soaked with Amy´s blood. She slipped into unconsciousness.
Rajamani opened Amy´s shirt and pants and had sex with her.
She remained unconscious for 10 to 15 minutes. Later, she fled the apartment located in what is known as phase 2 of Waterview Park. At a nearby pay phone, Amy called 911. At about 6:20 p.m., two detectives, an officer and a sergeant with the UTD Police Department, arrived and spoke to her. Then an ambulance took Amy to Parkland hospital.
Shortly after 7 p.m., Detectives Steve Finney and Chris Dickson knocked on the door of Rajamani´s apartment. They asked about Amy. Rajamani admitted he´d drugged her with chloroform, then had sex with her. One detective read Rajamani his Miranda rights; then Rajamani led the detectives to the trash bin where he´d thrown the bottle of chloroform and the blood-soiled handkerchief. Rajamani had one comment: "He asked if she was OK."
Finney took Rajamani to the Richardson City Jail, then wrote an affidavit from which this account is taken. Rajamani, meanwhile, posted a $50,000 bond and was out of jail within 24 hours.
News of the assault would have been chilling to the extreme for any young woman living in the huge Waterview complex, which offered little in the way of security. But contrary to the practices of many universities in Texas and around the country, UTD did not issue a crime alert informing students about Rajamani or the sexual assault to which he´d confessed.
UTD Police Chief Colleen Ridge said there was no need. "Since he was taken into immediate custody, he´s not a threat," she said in an interview.
After bonding out of jail, Rajamani promptly returned to his third-floor apartment in phase 4 of Waterview. He recently told the Dallas Observer that UTD officials allowed him to stay there until the semester ended in December. Asked if this was correct, UTD officials declined to comment.
In January, a Dallas County grand jury indicted Rajamani on one count of aggravated sexual assault. The "deadly weapon," according to the indictment, was chloroform. If convicted, he could face life in prison.
UTD officials told the Observer that Rajamani no longer lives at Waterview. "He is not [a student], nor does he live on campus," Detective Finney said in an interview in late March.
That same day, however, two Observer reporters spoke with Rajamani--at Waterview.
Mold and water damage are easy to find at UTD´s on-campus dorms. Competent repairs are harder to find.
He was smoking a cigarette while sitting on the third-floor balcony of what had been his apartment. He readily agreed to talk. In a subsequent interview, Rajamani was reluctant to discuss what happened on November 18 but acknowledged he´d confessed to having drugged and raped Amy. Rajamani said he confessed because he didn´t understand his legal rights and because he believed it would help the doctors treating Amy. "I thought she was going to die," he said.
Rajamani said he now attends Tarleton State University in Stephenville. He said he returned to Waterview during spring break and stayed in his former apartment for a few days, though UTD officials had told him he was prohibited from returning to campus. He also said UTD officials made the right decision in not issuing a crime alert after arresting him. "The incident was between me and my friend," he said. "I didn´t do offense to someone I didn´t know."
Rajamani´s former neighbors at Waterview don´t see it that way. They had no idea he´d confessed to drugging and raping a fellow student. UTD officials should have told them, they say.
"It makes me angry," says Lakshmi Srinath, a software engineer at Nortel who lives one floor below Rajamani´s former apartment. "They should have informed us."
Sandya Narasimhaprasad, Srinath´s wife, shuddered when told about Rajamani. A graduate student at UTD majoring in computer engineering, she is eight months pregnant. "It´s very scary," she says. "The same thing could have happened to me."
What happened in the case of Amy, Rajamani and UTD isn´t unique. During the past three years, police records show, 10 students told police they were sexually assaulted at Waterview. By comparison, five students were sexually assaulted between 2001 and 2003 at dormitories at the University of North Texas in Denton--which house almost twice as many students as Waterview. During those same years, six students said they were the victims of aggravated assaults at Waterview. At UNT´s dorms, the figure was zero.
Several students interviewed by the Observer said they don´t feel safe at Waterview. And many residents said living conditions at Waterview are deplorable--ceilings that leak, toilets that don´t work for weeks, black mold that management ignores, as well as inadequate security and poor maintenance. Requests for repairs, in fact, are considered a bit of a joke at Waterview: A response can take weeks, or never take place at all. Conditions are so bad that the UTD Student Government Association sponsors a Web site where hundreds of complaints about Waterview have been posted. Its name: waterviewsux.com.
One student complained in March of an invasion by thousands of fire ants. There were so many ants coming from the window, the student wrote, "that at first we thought it was raining and then found out it was ants hitting the ground. The fire ants were all over the carpet, probably between 4,000 and 6,000 ants."
The previous month a student reported standing in the rain for a half-hour while waiting for a broken fire alarm to be turned off. False alarms occur so frequently, the student said, that "if the alarm went off for real, most of the people in the building would ignore it. Apparently UTD is big on burning its students alive."
The public and private officials who put together the real estate deal that resulted in Waterview dismiss student concerns. "It has worked well for us, and the [UTD] administration has been very happy," says Robert L. Lovitt, UTD´s senior vice president over business affairs.
And why not? As a business deal, Waterview is a blockbuster. According to the contractor, it cost $43.7 million to build. The initial owners were a group of private partnerships whose identities UTD declined to disclose. But Robert K. Utley III, a Dallas developer, freely acknowledges that his immediate family was behind the partnerships and that he had the controlling interest. And, says Utley, their return on the first 696 apartments alone was better than expected. "Over the term of the investment we made $10 million--clear," he says. "As a friend of mine said, ´Box-rattling money, stuff you can hear."
Utley´s company, Dallas-based FirstWorthing, continues to manage Waterview for the school. But in 2002, the family sold its ownership interest in the 696 apartments to a foundation headed by Utley´s wife, Ann. The Utley Foundation will channel all rent revenue to UTD, Utley says. Over the next 25 years, that should provide the university with more than $50 million, plus, at the end, full title to the property. "It´s a great deal," Utley says.
[Read full story at Dallas Observer]Based on the Dallas Observer article Dorm From Hell, the president of the University of Texas at Dallas put together a commission to examine findings of poor living conditions and inadequate security at the university´s only student housing. [read more]
UTD Orders Investigation of Waterview
By Kelsey Guy
The Dallas Observer
May 5, 2005
The president of the University of Texas at Dallas will put together a commission to examine Dallas Observer findings of poor living conditions and inadequate security at the university´s only student housing.
In an April 29 letter to students and faculty, UTD President Franklyn Jenifer said the panel will evaluate the 1,237-unit Waterview Park apartments and make recommendations to correct any problems found. The letter followed publication of "The Dorm From Hell," an April 28 Observer cover story detailing numerous problems at Waterview, including several sexual assaults for which UTD failed to inform students.
Jenifer, who will retire soon after 11 years as president, said the article raised questions that cannot be ignored. "The Observer piece strikes at the very heart of a number of ´student life´ issues that all of us here at UTD should care deeply about--everything from crime and personal safety to alleged health hazards to reportedly not being able to get repairs implemented in a timely manner," he wrote. Jenifer said Dr. David Daniel, his successor, has endorsed the idea of appointing an investigative panel.
On Tuesday at 10 a.m., about 50 Waterview residents participated in a sit-in at the management office of the complex to protest conditions. Waterview is managed by FirstWorthing, a private company. One of those present was Laura Rashedi, former Student Government Association president. "We want residents to know the reality of the way we live, and we want it to change, and we will do whatever it takes to get things changed," she said. If there is no change, she said, "the next step would be to do this during freshman lease signings."
Asked for comment on the sit-in, UTD spokeswoman Jenni Huffenberger said, "It´s needed and important that students be able to sit in and air their grievances...I think there will be changes in terms of maintenance issues and making students feel more safe in the environment."
Many residents say life at Waterview, the nation´s largest private dorm, is a nightmare of black mold, broken toilets and leaking ceilings. In interviews with the Observer, UTD officials painted an entirely different picture. They said crime is not a problem and that they are proud of conditions and maintenance. Robert Lovitt, UTD´s senior vice president of business affairs, called Waterview "one of the best success stories in the United States." Lovitt, who has overseen Waterview from the beginning--its first residents moved in in 1989--will retire at the end of this month.
Robert K. Utley III, the Dallas developer who built and still manages Waterview, told the Observer the complex has provided his family with $10 million in profits and will generate tens of millions of dollars in additional profits for UTD over the next 25 years. Utley said security and maintenance have long been inadequate, but he blamed the international students´ way of life for creating many of the problems at Waterview. "Because a lot of the foreign students cook fish and curry, it´s embedded in the walls," he said. "We have to rip the carpet out at turnover."
Jenifer described Utley´s comments as "insensitive at best."
"Mr. Utley certainly was not speaking for me or any member of the UTD administration in making such regrettable remarks," Jenifer wrote in his letter.
Jenifer said the head of the investigative commission will have no direct connection to Waterview or the UTD Police Department. The other members will include faculty members, students and staffers. Jenifer promised to appoint the panel within a week and said Dr. Daniel wants a preliminary report by the end of June.
Discrepancies between the reports of sexual assualt and crime on Texas A&M´s campus by university police and womens´ counseling centers is both staggering and misleading to students. [read more]
Statistics suggest that sexual assaults on the Texas A&M University campus are almost nonexistent. But is that true? Between 2001 and 2003, eight cases of sexual assault were reported to the University Police Department. Independent experts say that the numbers, if properly documented and reported, should be significantly higher.
A group of Texas A&M journalism students was assigned to a project team that researched the statistics to determine whether the campus is as safe and secure as the numbers suggest. The accompanying story was reported, written and edited by those 12 students.
The students were enrolled this spring in an inaugural course called Special Topics in Journalism as a Profession. They were required to work closely with professional journalists to produce projects throughout the semester.
The topic of sexual assault reporting on campus was inspired by The Light of Day, an initiative of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. The Light of Day is meant to help journalism students across Texas inspect compliance with the federal Clery Act at public and private institutions. The Freedom of Information Foundation started the project after concerns were raised last year about misleading crime statistics on Texas campuses.
Photo above: Seated (from left to right): Mari Saugier, Janet McLaren, Amber Gray, Carrie Pierce, Laura Brenner and Kirk Ehlig. Standing (from left to right): Arena Welch, Megan Orton, Timothy Holliday, Sara Foley, Jenny Bruce and Emily Allen.
A&M students find little safety in numbers
The Bryan-College Station Eagle
May 11, 2005
Editor’s note: This story was reported, written and edited by a team of student journalists at Texas A&M University: Emily Allen, Laura Brenner, Jenny L. Bruce, Kirk Ehlig, Sara E. Foley, Amber Gray, Timothy Holliday, Janet McLaren, Megan Orton, Carrie Pierce, Mari Saugier and Arena Welch. The project was under the direction of Randy Sumpter, coordinator of journalism education at A&M, and Kelly Brown, managing editor of The Eagle.
Life forever changed for 17-year-old Melissa when a friend of her boyfriend raped and beat her.
He knocked the Dallas high school senior’s pelvis out of place and did enough damage to one knee to require two surgeries. A concussion was the least of her worries.
The man who attacked her at a party was enrolled at a Texas college she planned to attend. So Melissa, who asked that her last name not be published, did some research and discovered that Texas A&M University had a low crime rate. She decided to head to Aggieland and live in an off-campus dorm with 24-hour security — and at A&M she would be safe, she recalled thinking more than four years ago.
“The more I’m here, the more I realize that it’s not a haven,” said Melissa, now 21.
Always on guard, Melissa hasn’t been a victim of violence again, but her sense of security faded not long after she arrived at A&M. As other students learned she was a rape survivor, they whispered their own stories of horror that happened down the hall, across the campus.
It quickly became clear to Melissa that the crime statistics she reviewed had little to do with real numbers. And even though she knew sexual assault was a highly underreported crime in every community, she noticed that a federal law meant to expose the crime did little to tell the full story about rape at her school. The law, known as the Clery Act, requires colleges to disclose information about crime on campus.
Texas A&M police officials said that in 2003, the last period for which statistics were cited for the Clery report, three women reported being raped on campus. The same number was recorded the year before. In 2001, two people filed police reports saying they were sexual assaulted.
But officials with the Texas A&M Women’s Center and Counseling and Psychological Services said they listen, on average, to between 30 and 35 students a year reporting rapes to each office.
Even more students tell an agency off campus that they’ve been sexually assaulted. The Brazos County Rape Crisis Center reported in 2004 that 85 people between the ages of 18 and 25 reported being raped — and 70 percent of them were students, according to the center.
Little collaboration exists between police and the agencies that help the sexual assault victims, most of whom have been attacked by an acquaintance or while on a date. The only statistics mentioned in A&M’s annual crime report are those reported either directly to police or to police through the Division of Student Affairs. The Rape Crisis Center, which hears from more student victims than any other agency, is never polled, and neither are the Women’s Center nor those who dial up A&M’s counseling service.
“Officials want to close their eyes,” Melissa said. “They want to pretend it doesn’t happen here, but if someone genuinely wanted to let a college community know what the real numbers were, wouldn’t they use all the reporting resources they have? These are valid resources.”
Elmer Schneider, the interim director of security at A&M, said the University Police Department reports exactly what the Clery Act requires it to and isn’t trying to mislead students about safety on campus.
“The problem is getting all the information to know if it should be included in Clery,” he said, adding that it’s especially frustrating because most rape victims choose not to report the crime at all. The federal government estimates that one in 11 victims tells authorities about the crime.
“[We] have to weigh reporting double against the importance of letting people know there was or is a problem,” Schneider said.
The numbers
Some victims confide in a professor, but even that number has a hard time reaching police because many teachers aren’t aware of the reporting process at the university, where more than 44,000 students are enrolled.
A written protocol that is supposed to be distributed to all A&M faculty lays out the steps to follow, including reporting it to authorities even if the information is minimal — that an assault happened but no names are revealed. But, when asked, many professors said they’ve never seen the written protocol or even heard of it. It’s one of hundreds of pages given to them in a rules and regulations packet.
Federal law does not require the annual campus crime report to include the crime statistics from the city in which a university is based. Nowhere is it detailed in the 2003 A&M report that 30 rapes were reported in College Station that year or that 81 sexual assault cases were filed with police in neighboring Bryan.
That report is not required to mention crimes that happen across the street from campus, including Northgate or Eastgate. The jurisdiction stops at the sidewalk. Combine that with the fact that an unknown number of people don’t report being raped, and the result likely is a false sense of security in Aggieland, said experts who work with victims.
Linda Castoria, executive director of the Rape Crisis Center, said she doesn’t think authorities are trying to hide the number of sexual assaults. But she said there’s a definite problem with collecting accurate data and sharing it with the public.
“It’s a problem because stats don’t mean anything, especially with this crime, but at the very minimum we should be letting people who read these reports know what all the different agencies are seeing, not just one,” Castoria said.
Schneider said he was unsure why university faculty, counselors and the Rape Crisis Center don’t submit reports of rape to police, either directly or anonymously.
“What’s the prohibition from them telling us?” Schneider said.
On alert
Another concern shared by those who work with rape victims is the inconsistency with which A&M police notify students about sexual assaults on campus. Some crimes merit immediate warnings via e-mail when police determine the crime could be a threat to the community, Schneider said. But some notices show up in a student’s e-mail inbox weeks after the crime, and a few said they have never received an alert.
On Feb. 20, a 40-year-old man was arrested after gaining access to a northside residence hall, where police later said he tried to sexually assault a student. Police initially e-mailed an alert to campus residents, but all students and university employees weren’t notified until two weeks later.
Schneider said the goal is 48-hour notification and that the February situation was an oversight. The man was arrested shortly after the incident, which was highly publicized and left off-campus students asking why they didn’t receive an alert.
A larger concern, Castoria said, is that the crime was reported on the police blotter as a burglary of a habitation with the intent to commit a felony rather than as an attempted sexual assault. So, a resident reviewing the documents would not have been able to tell it was an attempted sexual assault, because the law allows public access to only the first page of an offense report. Schneider said the felony crime stipulated was the attempted assault.
Nearly three weeks later, a man was arrested after a woman said he tried to rape her as she walked to her dorm from a nearby parking garage. The alert to A&M students was sent out the next day.
On April 4, no alert was sounded after a woman reported that a man she knew tried to break into her university-owned apartment and attack her. Authorities said the threat to the rest of the community was low because the two knew each other.
The selective nature of the alerts concerns Castoria, who said awareness is never a bad thing.
Maj. Bert Kretzschmar, assistant director of criminal investigations and coordinator for the Clery Act for A&M police, said the department has to consider what’s in the best interest of the public. But he favors keeping the public updated, he said.
“The more the public is informed of what’s going on, the better off we’ll be,” he said.
Joel White, president of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, said delaying an alert negates the