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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:
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The University of New Hampshire (UNH) is a public institution, located in Durham, New Hampshire. The university has a reported violent crime rate of 2.03 crimes per 1,000 students, and the vast majority of the school’s reported crimes are forcible sex offenses. UNH reported 64 forcible sex offenses between 2011 and 2013, making up more than 70 percent of all violent crimes. The high number of sex offenses is likely related to the university’s efforts to encourage reporting on campus. UNH is widely recognized as a model campus in terms of dealing with sexual assault.
UNH’s bystander intervention program, “Bringing in the Bystander,” is used by schools across the country to help prevent assaults on campus. The school’s Sexual Harassment and Rape Prevention Program (SHARPP) offers several services to victims and sponsors educational events throughout the school year. SHARPP provides a 24-hour helpline for students and counseling services for rape victims. The University was recently asked by the White House to research effective policies and programs to prevent sexual assault in colleges across the country. While sexual assault remains an important issue for the University of New Hampshire and many other schools, UNH creates an atmosphere that encourages crime reporting and open dialogue among students, which is likely the reason its crime rate is high relative to other mid-sized schools.
The University of New Hampshire has a fully accredited police force on campus that has authority both on campus and in the surrounding town of Durham. UNH also recently introduced the LiveSafe app, which allows students to easily access safety and emergency information as well as report tips and incidents anonymously. The university also provides a free walking escort service called WalkSafe.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 14,913 (12,516 undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 2.03 per 1,000 students
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 64
Robbery: 2
Aggravated Assault: 25
Campus Setting: Suburb (Small)
-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.
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