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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 Jimmy Emerson, DVM via Flickr
Northern Arizona University is a public university located in Flagstaff, Arizona. The majority of the university’s reported violent crimes were forcible sex offenses, with 53 between 2011 and 2013.
Northern Arizona University’s sexual assault response protocol incorporates various university departments in the response and investigation process. Students can report crime anonymously, file a criminal incident report, or even ask for an administrative investigation from the school’s Office for Student Life. NAU Director of Public Affairs Tom Bauer told the Arizona Daily Sun:
If an incident of this nature occurs, multiple university offices — including the Police Department, Student Life, Residence Life, Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity and Campus Health Services — may be involved in addressing the issue…Some redundancy is built in so that the victim has multiple opportunities to learn about resources and options.
Northern Arizona University has a bystander intervention program, which provides counseling services to students and conducts an annual survey about campus life including issues like sexual assault. The university also has a police department, which is responsible for all law enforcement matters on campus, as well as other properties utilized by the university.
Cynthia Brown, a spokesperson for the university clarified changes to university reporting procedures in an email saying,
There are two things at play that change/skew the information. In 2011, the information from more than 30 campus sites, including our main campus in Flagstaff, was combined into each crime category. Secondly, the data we received for all of the campus sites outside of Flagstaff is not specific to the campuses or the university… the data is pulled by the local law enforcement agency based on a grid and not necessarily specific to the campus or its immediate surrounding area.
The university began reporting crimes that occur on its 30+ Extended Campus sites as separate campuses in 2012. The number of crimes reported in non-campus areas decreased for all categories following that change.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 26,594 (22,160 undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 1.09 per 1,000 students
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 53
Robbery: 9
Aggravated Assault: 25
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.
Editor’s Note: This slide has been updated to reflect a statement from a University of Northern Arizona spokesperson.
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