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Crime
Campus Crime 2015: Top 10 Highest Reported Crime Rates for Large 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 large schools, which include four-year institutions with enrollments greater than 20,000 students.
Click here to see the data used to create these rankings.
Check out the Top 10 Highest Crime Rates on Large Campuses below.
Image courtesy of Barbara Eckstein via Flickr
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The majority of reported violent crimes, 64 percent, were forcible sexual assaults with 88 reported between 2011 and 2013. The university is also one of many schools currently being investigated for potential Title IX violations relating to sexual assault cases. In February 2014, the Department of Education notified the University of Michigan that it is investigating the university in response to a complaint filed a month earlier. One of the cases that prompted the investigation was a rape case involving Brandon Gibbons, a kicker on the school’s football team. Gibbons was found responsible for sexual assault and dismissed from the school in 2013, four years after the incident occurred.
A recent high-profile civil lawsuit brought the issue of sexual assault back in the university’s focus earlier this year. A female student filed an eight-count civil lawsuit against two male students who she accuses of raping her after a fraternity mixer. The civil suit was filed after a criminal court dropped the charges due to lack of evidence and three separate disciplinary hearings held by the university concluded that an assault did not occur. The student also filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education at the end of 2014 in response to the university’s handling of her case.
The university adopted several changes to its sexual assault policies in 2013, which include initiating investigations with the Title IX coordinator, rather than the Office of Student Conflict Resolution, as well as implementing the “preponderance of evidence” for judicial proceedings. The university also started surveying its students to get a better understanding of sexual assault on campus. The most recent survey found that more than 20 percent of female students experienced unwanted sexual behavior in the past year. Earlier this year, the university’s police department created a special unit for sexual assault cases that occur on campus. The school’s Department of Public Safety employs a sworn police force with officers who have full arrest powers. The university of Michigan also has the Sexual Assault Prevention & Awareness Center, which seeks to increase awareness through providing resources to students and victims of sexual assault. The Department of Public Safety at Michigan has a full-service police force licensed by the Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 43,710 (28,283 undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 1.04 per 1,000 students
Murder: 1
Forcible Sex Offense: 88
Robbery: 14
Aggravated Assault: 34
Campus Setting: City (Midsized)
-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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