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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 Bob Mical via Flickr
University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Most of the violent crimes reported at the university are forcible sex assaults, making up nearly 90 percent of the school’s reported violent crimes.
In May 2014, UVA was included on a list of schools facing investigations from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for possible Title IX violations. After the list was released the University of Virginia noted in a statement that the school has been working with the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights since 2011 to review its sexual assault policies. In 2012, a student filed a complaint with the Department of Education regarding a sexual assault that occurred in the previous year. The complaint alleges that the university mishandled the case and that the school’s medical center lost some of the evidence that supported her claim. When more than 18 months passed since the student filed the complaint, she petitioned a judge to force a resolution in the government’s investigation of her case. While the court eventually sided against her–saying that she could not force a federal agency to resolve a complaint–the case remains an issue for the university.
Sexual assault became a particularly controversial subject at UVA after Rolling Stone published an article last November about an alleged gang rape that occurred in 2012. The article was eventually retracted due to several reporting errors, but the aftermath had significant consequences for the university. Coincidentally, the school announced several changes to its sexual assault policies on the same day that the article was published. Among the changes were a zero tolerance policy and a new website that allows students to anonymously report sexual assaults. The university later hired an additional trauma counselor, added a police substation to increase patrols, and extended the public comment period on the new policy changes. UVA has a police force with over 130 employees including sworn officers, community service officers, and administrative personnel.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 23,464 (16,087 undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 1.12 per 1,000 students
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 71
Robbery: 2
Aggravated Assault: 6
Campus Setting: City (Small)
-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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