Image courtesy of [Ian D. Keating via Flickr]
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 University of Hawaii System via Flickr
The University of Hawaii at Manoa is a public institution located outside downtown Honolulu and is the flagship school of the University of Hawaii system. Most of the reported violent crimes at the university are forcible sex offenses and aggravated assaults.
UHM is currently under investigation by the Department of Education to ensure that the university is compliant with Title IX regulations, specifically in relation to sexual assault. In a statement, the school noted that the list does not differentiate between schools that are being chosen for “proactive compliance reviews,” like Hawaii, or schools where a student complaint prompted an investigation. The university recently adopted an affirmative consent policy which means that clear consent must be provided before sexual contact, not just the lack of dissent. A activist group called UltraViolet recently began a negative ad campaign against UHM and several other colleges facing Title IX investigations. The ads accused the school of having a “rape problem,” but university officials strongly rejected the ads, claiming that they painted the school in an unfair light.
The school has a Department of Public Safety that handles campus safety. The school provides information about sexual assault policies and resources online. This year the school created a campus safety app that allows students to submit tips to campus police, includes a “Safety Timer,” which allows friends and family to monitor a student while out, and will enable police to locate someone when they are reporting an emergency.
In a phone conversation with Law Street, university spokesperson Dan Meisenzahl emphasized the perception of safety that students have on campus. In an email to Law Street Meisenzahl noted,
UH is a commuter school with just 3,000 students living on campus, does not have a fraternity/sorority culture on campus and is located in a very safe neighborhood in one of the safest states in the country.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 20,006 (14,499 undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 1.17 per 1,000 students
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 33
Robbery: 4
Aggravated Assault: 33
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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