Category | News

Recent violent crimes upset the sense of refuge on college campuses

Published on November 3, 2009 by The Sentinel

Tuition may not be the most troubling concern for parents sending sons and daughters off to college.

A disturbing pattern of violent crime has erupted across the nation’s campuses - from Yale University, where a female graduate student was strangled, to the University of California at Los Angeles, where a chemistry student was stabbed repeatedly in a lab.

While saying that campuses almost always are safer than their surrounding communities, Jonathan Kassa of Security On Campus Inc. acknowledged that the headlines can create the opposite impression.

“This has been a very uniquely deadly and brutal first semester, so there is concern,” said Kassa, the executive director of the nonprofit organization, which seeks to reduce campus crime.

This month at Sacramento State University in California, a student was beaten to death in his dormitory by a bat-wielding roommate. A football player was fatally knifed at the University of Connecticut.

Kassa said that sensational tragedies not only distort the college picture, but can distract students from the bigger problems of theft, assault, stalking, sex offenses and alcohol abuse.

Parents and students should be aware of four important points about crimes at colleges: Four of five cases are student on student. Most victims are men. More offenses occur off campus. Alcohol is involved 90 percent of the time.

Deadly crime is rare on campuses, Kassa said, and statistics give no indication it is increasing.

Four cases - one sex offense and three robberies - occurred at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Ten violent crimes - six aggravated assaults, a sex offense and three robberies - were reported at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

Twenty-six such crimes occurred at the eight public colleges in Kansas, a decrease of three from 2007. They included nine sex offenses.

Five of the sex offenses were committed on or near KU’s campus. Two were at the medical school in Kansas City, Kan., where there also were three aggravated assaults. Both campuses had just one robbery each, but university police in Lawrence reported two aggravated assaults.

At Kansas State University, three violent crimes - a robbery and two aggravated assaults - were reported on campus in 2008. In 2007, 13 violent crimes were reported, including eight sex offenses.

In Lawrence and Manhattan, police are hunting a serial rapist who they think has attacked 13 women off campus in the last decade. In August, KU police reported an unrelated attempted rape in a campus dormitory.

To put those crime rates in perspective, they occurred in student populations of 136,811 and 67,488, respectively.

There have been no murders, on or off campus, at area universities since 2005, when three KU students in an off-campus apartment died at the hands of an arsonist, and an elderly MU professor was found slain in a campus garage.

Since 1990, all colleges and universities in federal financial aid programs annually report crimes on and near their campuses to the U.S. Department of Education. The data are passed to the Justice Department.

In 2007, the latest year for which national numbers are available, 48 killings occurred on the nation’s four-year campuses. That year, however, a mentally ill student gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech.

The year before, eight people died violently on the nation’s more than 4,000 campuses, down from 11 in 2005.

Since the Virginia Tech rampage, all universities have tried to prepare for the rare incident of a person on campus with a gun.

Robbery is a far more common campus crime. Hundreds occur each year.

According to Security On Campus Inc., sexual assault is increasing. The numbers don’t show it, but officials think it often goes unreported.

Thieves commit most of the crimes at area schools. Crimes of opportunity are most prevalent, campus police said, because students walk away from a laptop or iPod or leave their cars or dorm rooms unlocked.

Whether a school is nestled among cornfields or next to inner-city neighborhoods can affect the amount of crime.

The Web site The Daily Beast recently analyzed 4,000 reports from public and private four-year schools and said the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, Long Island, with 11,831 students, was the safest in the country.

The least safe campus on the list was Emerson College, an arts-focused school in Boston. In The Daily Beast’s survey, many urban campuses fared poorly, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland at Baltimore and Tufts University in Medford, Mass., outside Boston.

A few weeks ago, a UMKC student was mugged  walking home from the business school. Kipp Cozad, a UMKC graduate student from Liberty, Mo., heard about it, “but I have never felt uncomfortable here.”

Cozad said she takes many night classes, but “I park fairly close and I never find myself drifting off where there aren’t people around.”

Surprisingly, experts say crime can occur less often on urban campuses because students there expect it and act accordingly. At more rural schools, students might feel more secure and take fewer precautions.

April Beffer, who is majoring in social work, goes everywhere on the UMKC campus with a group, but she still feels more secure on campus than at home, especially after recent rapes - against women who were not students - in and near the Waldo area.

Crime comes in spurts and cycles, but for the most part is fairly steady, said Don Stubbings, a crime prevention officer for the K-State Police Department.

“Let’s say burglars move on or near campus one year; the next year they are gone. That crime tapers off, and then a different crime is up,” Stubbings said.

“Campus crime is not new,” said Kassa of Security On Campus Inc. “You can’t stop it all. You can’t control everything, search everyone, but you can reduce the risks and strengthen the response. Be prepared.”