Shift in Crime-Reporting Law Fails to End Debate Over Accuracy of Statistics

By JULIE L. NICKLIN

If you looked at Ohio State University's crime report, you'd think that taking a step off the campus would put you in serious danger.

On the streets of Columbus, Ohio, adjacent to the campus, city police handled 592 burglaries, 403 motor-vehicle thefts, 64 aggravated assaults, 49 forcible sex offenses,

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and 5 murders or manslaughters in 1998, according to the report.

Ohio State and other institutions included statistics in their crime reports from public property surrounding their campuses because of legislation passed by Congress in fall 1998. For the past 10 years, a federal law has required colleges to annually report crimes on their campuses. The new legislation calls on colleges to also report crimes on public property that is "reasonably contiguous" to campuses, beginning with their 1999 submissions.

The order sounds easy enough. But many colleges and universities that tried to obey it in their 1998 reports (even though they were not legally required to do so for that year) are saying that compliance is going to be a challenge.

Initially, there was a lot of confusion over what constitutes "reasonably contiguous" property. It has since been defined as public sidewalks, streets, and parking lots adjacent to a campus, or any public property running through it, such as a city-owned trail. Yet many campuses are still struggling to nail down the figures for those areas, because they must rely on local police departments, which, in many cases, track the crimes differently and more broadly than do colleges.

So, while the legislation was intended to paint a more accurate picture of crime levels on and around college campuses, some campus-security experts and police officials say it in fact seems to be muddying the numbers.

"The diversity of compliance is going to be so extensive, it's going to be hard to make comparisons," says S. Daniel Carter, vice president of Security on Campus, a campus-crime watchdog group in King of Prussia, Pa.

Indeed, many institutions that are now preparing their 1999 reports, which they must make public by October 1, are coming up against the same stumbling blocks that institutions like Ohio State hit while conducting a trial run on the new changes in 1998.

As Ohio State was assembling its report, its police officers weren't sure just what constituted "reasonably contiguous" public property.

Since then, campus police officers, safety experts, and the U.S. Department of Education, which is monitoring compliance, have reached a consensus on the definition of "reasonably contiguous."

Ohio State, not knowing how those discussions would pan out, decided to play it safe in 1998. Officials included three full Columbus police patrol zones that touch the campus -- which widened the campus's reporting area by more than a mile on each side. That's how the city police compile the information, and that's what they released to the university.

But Ohio State's job wasn't over. Capt. John R. Hartsock, of the campus's police department, had to reclassify some of the city's crime categories, which are defined under state law, to make them comparable with the way Ohio State, under federal law, classifies crimes.

For example, the Columbus police department puts rape in its own category, and other forcible sex crimes, such as fondling and sodomy, under categories with names like gross sexual imposition. Ohio State, following federal guidelines, lumps these three into the category of forcible sex offenses. So Captain Hartsock had to leaf through the city's records to pull out the fondling and sodomy cases, as well as other sex crimes Ohio State considers forcible.

The results? Not surprisingly, the number of crimes on the adjacent public property was significantly higher than the same offenses on campus property, or in off-campus fraternity and sorority houses and campus-owned buildings.

In those police zones, the number of forcible sex offenses was seven times greater than in on-campus property and in off-campus buildings tied to the campus. Burglaries were more than twice as high, robberies 15 times greater, and motor-vehicle thefts 11 times more common.

Captain Hartsock says that the three zones adjacent to the campus typically have the highest crime rates in the city. Just 1 mile east, he says, are "rows and rows of crack houses" that are frequently raided by city police. The university, he says, is spending millions on community-development projects to help clean up the areas.

But he wonders if the legislation is achieving its intended purpose, since only about 20 percent of the university's roughly 48,000 students live in the off-campus area included in the three zones. An equal proportion live on the campus, and the majority -- 60 percent -- live up to 10 miles northwest of the campus in a part of Columbus that traditionally has the lowest crime rate, according to Captain Hartsock.

"If I were a potential student, that number we're required to publish wouldn't tell me anything" about the zones around the campus, Major Hartsock says. "All I'd have to do is ride around there and say, 'Why would I live there?'"

Jay L. Evans, a patrol commander with the Columbus police force, agrees that the zones include a much wider area than the campus should have to report. "It skews the statistics when we look at what goes on in the campus area," he says.

The Columbus police department, he says, can work with Ohio State in the future to narrow the reporting region -- although including crimes on just the sidewalks and streets adjacent to the campus might not go far enough. That definition wouldn't include Pearl Alley, a pedestrian area filled with bars and shops that is frequented by Ohio State students. It's a matter of whether you're looking for "accuracy or consistency," Mr. Evans says, since the distances students travel from the campus vary widely among institutions.

Tufts University also made its first stab at including adjacent public-property figures in 1998, but with limited success. The university has three campuses: an undergraduate campus in a residential area of Medford, Mass.; a veterinary school in a rural area in Grafton, Mass.; and medical and dental schools in Boston.

The Boston police gave Tufts officials, who were trying to pin down crimes around the medical and dental campuses, a grid map with crime totals for an area "far beyond what our needs are," says John King, Tufts' director of public safety, and president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.

Tufts chose not to include public property in its 1998 report, and it is still trying to figure out how it will pare down the size of the reporting area in its 1999 report. Officials aren't sure whether they will ask an officer to put in extra hours, hire a new person, ask the city police to handle the task, or just report the statistics for the whole area.

"No municipal police departments are required to maintain statistics in the way we need them," Mr. King says.

Education Department officials say that the new regulations take that problem into account, and simply ask institutions to make a "good faith" effort to get the information from local police. Colleges that are found to be in noncompliance with the crime-reporting law face fines of up to $25,000.

Some campuses haven't had much trouble figuring out how to handle the new reporting requirements.

Maj. Jamie Herring, interim chief of police at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, says his department has computer software that allows it to limit the crime statistics to public property "going through, immediately touching, or creating a border" around the campus.

"It's just the snap of a finger, and we can do our statistics however we need to," says Major Herring.

He has little patience for other campuses that say the new requirements are too confusing, or too labor-intensive. In fact, he suspects that some campuses might be trying to make their statistics incomprehensible, so that they can't be held accountable.

"People who include their town statistics are almost thwarting the purpose of the law," says Major Herring. "They're not telling you how safe the campus and the area around it is. It's almost dishonest to include entire municipalities."

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