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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 Redjar via Flickr
Amherst College is a liberal arts school located in Amherst, Massachusetts. Sexual assault accounts for nearly all of the reported violent crime at the school. In 2012, the college faced allegations that its sexual assault cases were not properly handled by campus administrators. In 2013, the school faced a government investigation to determine if its sexual assault policies violated the Clery Act. Amherst then added a new Title IX coordinator to its staff and altered its website, which now prominently discusses sexual assault. Moreover, the school banned off-campus fraternities, some of which were linked to rape cases. Ninety-eight percent of the student body lives in university-owned, operated, or affiliated housing, and the other two percent live off campus. Some students, especially members of the school’s “underground” fraternities, see this ban as a weak effort to make up for past mishandling of sexual assault. The school has said that this decision is simply enforcing official policy that has been in place since 1984.
Amherst is also listed on the Department of Education’s Title IX watchlist, which means the school is under investigation for possible violations in its sexual assault policy. The campus is protected by the Amherst College Police Department, which is comprised of 11 full-time officers under the direction of the Chief of Police. While Amherst has improved its crime reporting, as well as its policies on reporting sexual assault, this still remains a big problem for the school.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 1,785 (all undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 8.03 per 1,000 students
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 40
Robbery: 0
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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