Counting college crime isn’t always as easy as 1-2-3.

Although some form of federal mandate for reporting campus crime has been on the books since 1991, reporting standards still vary from school to school, largely because of challenges to gathering data, how institutions interpret the law and the politics of school security.

Campus safety advocates and state officials are concerned that inconsistency has watered down the value of the so-called Clery statistics because parents, students and community leaders cannot draw any solid conclusions from comparing one school’s report to another.

“Comparing one campus’s stats to another’s isn’t comparing apples to apples,” said Jennifer Beeman, director of the Campus Violence Prevention program at the University of California, Davis. “It’s comparing apples and Volvos. Everyone (counts crime) differently.”

“It’s complicated,” said Sacramento State Police Chief Ken Barnett of gathering Clery crime stats. “The (Clery Act) includes alleged crimes and reports from sources outside law enforcement. We don’t count crime the same way for Clery as we do, say, for the FBI, where we’re dealing strictly with police reports.”

The Clery Act, named after the Pennsylvania student who was murdered in her campus dorm room in 1986, requires colleges and universities that receive federal money disclose alleged crimes, arrests and disciplinary actions for breaking the law or campus weapons, alcohol or drug rules. The murdered girls parents, Howard and Connie Clery, established Safety on Campus, Inc., a college crime-fighting advocacy group in Pennsylvania.

A State Hornet review of Clery numbers from four Northern California universities, including Sacramento State, show how schools use different standards to report crimes.

Border orders

CSU Stanislaus, the smallest of the four universities surveyed with 6,351 students enrolled last fall, reported 259 incidents of aggravated assault in 2001. Sac State, with 24,866 students, reported only seven.

One reason for the sky-high Stanislaus statistic is their interpretation of Clery. Stanislaus counts crimes within a one-mile radius of both their campuses.

So when the Stockton police department reported 250 of those 259 assaults within a mile of the Stockton satellite campus, Stanislaus officials added them to their report.

Sac State counts crimes reported on streets, sidewalks, parking facilities and other public property adjacent to the campus, but it does not define a one-mile perimeter.

To count or not to count?

The Clery Act requires that schools report crimes in any facility used by students, such as fraternity and sorority houses or offices where interns work. In past years, a Sacramento City police information officer filtered city crime reports before forwarding them to campus law enforcement, so that only the offenses that fall under the university’s interpretation of Clery law were counted.

This year, due to budget trimming, city police didn’t have the staff to package the report for Sac State, so campus law enforcement had to do the collating.

It was a time consuming task that Barnett said started in March and ended in September.

In some cases, his staffers couldn’t determine if a crime fell within Clery rules, so the chief set up a new policy.

“I said, ‘Hey, if we can’t narrow it down, we’ll count it,'” Barnett said in an interview last week.

UC Davis officials faced the same problem collecting Sacramento statistics for their Med Center campus on Stockton Boulevard. Their scientific high-ticket solution: A $1 million grant to purchase software and pay staff to crunch the numbers.

Location, location, location

UC Davis and Stanislaus have substantial off campus facilities, while Sac State and CSU Chico do not. That fact can skew the reports, according UC Davis’s Beeman.

“We’ve got Stockton Boulevard to account for,” she said of the street near the UC Med Center long known for prostitution, drug dealing and other criminal activity.

While no one is willing to take open shots at the Clery Act, some believe that the law is so complex and the issue so politically charged, that many campus police and administrators worry they’ll come under fire from the media or Safety on Campus, Inc.

“People like (Sr. Vice President of Security on Campus, Inc.) Daniel Carter are so convinced that people are hiding things that everyone is running scared, afraid to make honest mistakes. The guy has a lot of power,” said one university administrator who spoke to the State Hornet on condition of anonymity.

“I’m sure that many rapists and murderers feel that the police have too much influence and power over them too,” Carter said in an interview from his King of Prussia, Pa., office. “Only schools that aren’t doing enough to protect their students from violence, and comply with their legal obligations to report campus crime have anything to be afraid of. I also think the great progress made by the UC and CSU systems over the last two years to come into compliance with the Clery Act demonstrates that it is not impossible.”

UC Davis, UC Irvine and UC Riverside two years ago endured a media pelting and federal audits after the Sacramento Bee alleged those schools failed to accurately report sexual assaults. Security on Campus, Inc. was among the most vocal critics.A bill passed by Governor Gray Davis last month requires the State Auditor to randomly select and analyze the Clery reports of at least six California colleges or universities every three years and report their findings to the Legislature.

The first auditor’s report is due Jan. 1, 2004.

“I was prompted to write the legislation by articles I read in the Bee about the Clery problems at UC Davis,” said Assemblywoman Hannah Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), who authored the bill, AB 2533.

Jackson said one of the things auditors will look for are inconsistencies in reporting methods.

She hopes that by injecting state oversight into the federal law, that schools will feel more pressure to comply to a common set of standards.

“The Clery Act is well-intentioned, but it relies on self-reporting. It has no real teeth to catch violating schools. We wanted to get the attention of California institutions that we can’t turn a blind eye to this anymore,” Jackson said.