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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:
Courtesy of Ianmccor via Wikimedia Commons.
Benedict College is a historically black liberal arts school located in Columbia, South Carolina. Between 2011 and 2013 Benedict had an average violent crime rate of 9.55 crimes per 1,000 students. During that period, the school saw 55 aggravated assaults, making up 76 percent of the school’s reported violent crimes. Assaults spiked in 2012 as the school experienced a notable increase in reports with 23–more than twice the amount in the previous year. In 2013 that number of aggravated assaults fell back down to a total of eight.
Benedict seeks to inform prospective and current students, faculty, and staff about crime on campus through a variety of programs. The school’s Department of Campus Police has a force of 11 commissioned and seven non-commissioned officers, as well as a four-person support staff that operates the Central Dispatch Center. Commissioned officers at Benedict are armed, have full arrest authority and statewide jurisdiction, which enables them to respond to incidents that take place off campus.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 2,512 (all undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 9.55 per 1,000 students
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 6
Robbery: 11
Aggravated Assault: 55
Campus Setting: City (Midsize)
-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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