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Crime
Campus Crime 2015: Top 10 Highest Reported Crime Rates for Small 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 small schools, which include four-year institutions with enrollments between 1,500 to 10,000 students.
Click here to see the data used to create these rankings.
Check out the Top 10 Highest Crime Rates on Small Campuses below:
Image courtesy of M R via Flickr
Gallaudet University is a small school in Washington, DC that specializes in education and career development for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. The high number of forcible sex assaults–49 in the three-year period–plays a large part in why the school’s violent crime rate is so high. While Gallaudet has faced criticism in the past, it was recently given a $300,000 grant to continue its efforts to prevent sexual violence.
Preventing sexual assault is a focus of Gallaudet’s safety efforts, which include extensive online information and training to report and prevent sexual offenses. Gallaudet uses a number of safety measures to help protect its students, including requiring ID cards for access to certain buildings, posting safety tips on its website, and even offering walking escorts. The school also recently implemented two safety programs–EmergenSee and the Green Dot Program–which promote bystander intervention to prevent crime. As part of the SAVE Act, Gallaudet instituted mandatory online sexual assault training for incoming students and faculty.
Officials from Gallaudet say that accurate statistics and a campus environment that makes students comfortable reporting crimes, especially rape, are the reasons for its relatively high numbers. Public Relations Director Catherine Murphy noted in a phone interview that one reason for high rates of reporting is campus police officers’ ability to speak sign language, which makes it more likely for students to report crimes to campus police than another authority. She also said that Gallaudet encourages students to report crimes and are aggressive in promoting an environment that makes students feel comfortable and safe to report crimes.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 1,561 (1,077 undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 11.74 per 1,000 students
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 49
Robbery: 3
Aggravated Assault: 3
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.
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