Image courtesy of [Matthew Rogers via Flickr]
Crime
Campus Crime 2015: Top 10 Highest Reported Crime Rates for Mid-Sized Colleges
Student safety is a high priority for all colleges and universities. While colleges and universities are typically safer than the areas that surround them, many schools face important and unique challenges. Law Street’s Campus Crime Rankings were created to serve as a comprehensive look at the safety of our college campuses, and to act as a resource for students, families, and college communities.
Federal law requires all postsecondary institutions that receive federal financial aid to report and monitor criminal offenses on their campuses. Each year this self-reported data is published by the Department of Education to help colleges and their communities understand the safety challenges that they face. Law Street Campus Crime Rankings utilize the most recent three years of this data to determine the average violent crime rate per 1,000 students for each school with available statistics.
Our rankings break up schools into different categories to ensure that the comparisons are as helpful and fair as possible. This list ranks mid-sized schools, which include four-year institutions with enrollments between 10,000 to 20,000 students.
Click here to see the data used to create these rankings.
Check out the Top 10 Highest Crime Rates on Mid-Sized Campuses below:
Image courtesy of Ted Eytan via Flickr
Howard University is a private, historically black university located in Washington, D.C. Howard has the highest violent crime rate among medium-sized colleges with an average of 2.88 violent crimes per 1,000 students. Howard reported more robberies than any other medium-sized school with 48 between 2011 and 2013. Howard’s 2012 robbery count was revised last year to include 11 robberies that were recorded by the Metropolitan Police Department.
Two high-profile crimes in the summer of 2013 sparked debate over the safety of Howard students. A Howard senior was shot and killed during a robbery that occurred off campus in July and weeks later a woman was raped in a Howard classroom during the daytime. Even though that murder did not occur on campus and as a result is not included in the Clery Act statistics, the event influenced students’ perceptions of safety on and around campus. In response to these incidents, the Howard and D.C. police departments increased their presence on campus. In recent years Howard has made several attempts to provide new safety services for its students. In 2011, Howard instituted the Guardian system, which allows students to request that the school’s police department monitor them while walking alone. Howard recently started holding mandatory Title IX orientation for freshmen and implemented bystander intervention training to help prevent sexual assault on campus. The Howard University Department of Public Safety consists of both armed Special Police Officers and unarmed Security Officers who are commissioned or licensed by the Metropolitan Police Department.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 10,297 (6,974 undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 2.88 per 1,000
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 16
Robbery: 48
Aggravated Assault: 25
Campus Setting: City (Large)
-Campus crime statistics are three year totals from 2011, 2012, and 2013
-The average violent crime rate is an average of the three-year data shown as a rate per 1,000 students
Click here to see the methodology used for the rankings.
Research and analysis done by Law Street’s Crime in America team:
Kevin Rizzo, Kwame Apea, Jennie Burger, Alissa Gutierrez, and Maurin Mwombela.
Comments