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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 Jtvoyager via Wikimedia Commons.
Trinity College is a private institution in the city of Hartford, Connecticut. The school saw 38 forcible sexual assaults between 2011 and 2013, making up 65 percent of all reported violent crimes. Roughly 55 percent of forcible sex offenses at Trinity occurred in the school’s residence halls. The number of these offenses recently jumped from eight in 2012 to 23 in 2013. Fred Alford, Trinity’s Dean of Students, said in an email that he believes the “increase in the number of reported sex offense incidents shows progress toward creating a safer and more responsive environment at Trinity for students to disclose incidents.”
Security officers at Trinity College receive full police training, though they do not have the authority to make arrests and may only carry defensive equipment. Trinity does offer several safety services like 24-hour foot and vehicle patrols, late night escort services, controlled dormitory access, and 24-hour emergency phones.
In response to Trinity’s recent increase in reported crime, Kathy Andrews, a spokesperson for the college, told Law Street:
We take very seriously our responsibility to protect the members of our community and we have looked closely at these numbers to determine what we can learn and where we can improve. At the same time, we believe firmly that a major reason for the increase in the number of reports is more frequent bystander, anonymous, and victim reporting that has resulted from our campus-wide efforts to raise awareness of and address the issue of sexual misconduct. These efforts include required educational programs for all students and an emphasis on student bystander intervention. Our broader goal at Trinity is to reduce and ultimately eliminate incidents of sexual misconduct, and all incidents of crime, so that every student, faculty member, and staff member feels − and is − safe.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 2,390 (2,301 undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 8.09 per 1,000 students
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 38
Robbery: 7
Aggravated Assault: 13
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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