Underage drinking, drugs, burglary and motor vehicle theft continue to be the biggest law enforcement problems confronting Sacramento State police and administrators, according to a federally mandated report released last month.

Meanwhile, Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation to strengthen campus crime reporting through random audits of institutional figures.

Statistics in the Sac State’s Clery Report indicate that the university last year handled 206 disciplinary cases involving student violations of campus alcohol or drug policies. Spread out over the year, that’s an average of one incident per school day.

“You have to understand what you’re seeing when you see these numbers,” said university Police Chief Ken Barnett. “If a (residence hall adviser) sees five underage students in a room with one can of beer, maybe only one person was drinking, but the RA would report it as five incidents.”

Such are the ambiguities of reporting crime and legal violations culled from more than a dozen law enforcement agencies, staff and faculty who contact students.

For example, if students attend a Sac State class at a downtown building, Clery requires the university to add that facility’s crime stats to its own.

Moreover, in previous years some sexual assaults – which are reported without disclosing a victim’s identity – were double-reported to police from, say, the campus Health Center and the Women’s Resource Center. Campus administrators are working to coordinate reports and eliminate duplications.

Unlike the arrest and conviction numbers that all police report to the FBI, Clery stats include reported incidents from non-law enforcement agencies, making them difficult to collate. Still, Barnett said, the Clery report is valuable.

“It’s hard to get a finger on some of these figures, but the key is the intent of the law,” Barnett said. “It’s there to give people some mechanism to decide, ‘Should I send my child to this school?’ If you have two schools, one with 15 homicides and one with none, it’ll probably influence which one you decide to attend.”

Last year, the campus had 65 motor vehicle thefts, a drop off of nine from 2000. The number of forcible sex offenses dropped from five to four. Aggravated assaults fell from 13 to seven, according to the report. The number of burglaries jumped from 72 to 94.

Liquor law violations showed the largest gain. In 2000, University officials reported 124 cases of alcohol rule-breaking. Last year that number leapt to 183 incidents, a 47.6 percent increase, but still below the 208 cases reported in 1999, the data show.

Barnett, who has been on campus since 1976, chooses his words carefully when asked if Sac State is safe.

“I think things are good,” he said. “But anything that can happen anywhere else can happen here. We need people to stay alert and call us if they see anything suspicious.”

Public college and university police nationwide release crime statistics to comply with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure Act, the federal law named after freshman student who was raped and murdered in her Lehigh College dormitory in 1986. Many have come under criticism from advocacy groups who claim that schools routinely fail to accurately report criminal statistics for fear of creating panic or tarnishing their school’s image.

Local law enforcement is especially sensitive to those charges.

Two years ago, the Sacramento Bee alleged that the University of California, Davis underreported their Clery numbers. The report drew sharp denials from the university, which claimed that the Bee’s story reported facts out of context and omitted pertinent information.

A subsequent audit by a UC task force concluded that Davis officials had not tried to hide crime but did misunderstand the law, overstating some crime numbers while failing to report others, such as those that occurred at off-campus facilities. Several other schools were also found out of compliance for similar reasons.

That spurred Assemblywoman Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) to introduce the California Campus Crime Audit bill earlier this year. Signed into law by Davis last month to take effect in 2004, it authorizes the state auditor to randomly select at least six colleges or universities every three years to verify the crime statistics they report.

Campus safety activists hailed the law as a step toward keeping schools honest.

“Schools underreport to protect their image,” said Daniel Carter, president of Security on Campus, Inc., a nonprofit monitoring group. “They don’t want the bad publicity and the don’t want to go to the trouble to correctly evaluate all of their information.”

Sophomore Jayneane Hutchinson said that she doesn’t think most students worry about campus crime much.

“We’re a commuter school, so coming here is kind of like going to the mall. I usually don’t worry about crime at the mall because I don’t live there,” she said. “At least until the first time my car gets broken into or someone grabs my purse.”