West Chester University Police Chief Michael Bicking is anything but lax when it comes to the safety and security of students both on and surrounding campus.The Department of Public Safety recently underwent a serious reevaluation of their crime reporting techniques. A lengthy article, published on Sunday, Jan. 15, 2006, in The Philadelphia Inquirer exposed weaknesses in the university’s previous system of reporting and examining crimes. The article, written by Patrick Kerkstra, stated that WCU painted “an illusory picture of a campus almost immune to significant crime.” Kerkstra, who spent month’s investigating crime reports of many Philadelphia-area colleges and universities, exposed discrepancies between the crime statistics reported to the state and those reported to the federal government. The two areas Kerkstra focused on in his report were sex offenses and burglaries.
The federal law requiring crime data to be compiled and submitted is known as the Clery Act. Named after Lehigh University freshman Jeanne Ann Clery, who was raped and murdered in her dorm room by a fellow Lehigh student in April 1986, the Act requires universities to count and report, annually, crimes such as murder, aggravated assault and robbery that occur on or near campus. The Clery Act, passed in 1990, has since gone through five revisions. In July 2005, a 216-page handbook was published in an attempt to ease the confusion of university police departments.
Crimes are reported to the Pennsylvania state government via a Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The Uniform Crime Reporting System is a standardized method of reporting crimes that divides offenses into two parts. Part I offenses include the most serious of crimes including, but not limited to: murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, assault, burglary and arson. Part II offenses are the less serious crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, vandalism, receiving stolen property, prostitution, drug offenses, gambling, sex offenses (non-rape), liquor law violations and nine others. The Part I crimes were all reported in the university’s Clery filings, however the Part II offenses were, accidentally or otherwise, omitted.
Because the Clery Act was drafted and meant to enforce the law in a college environment in which crimes are often committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol, it gathers all sex offenses except statutory rape and incest in one category: “forcible sexual offenses.” Colleges and universities, in their state filings however, must file sex offenses into two categories: “rape,” which is defined as forcible carnal knowledge of a woman, and “sex offenses,” which includes everything other than rape. All of the crimes filed into the “sex offenses” category of the state filings were improperly left out of the Clery filings.
Burglary, defined in the criminal justice field as the crime of breaking and entering into a structure for the purpose of committing a crime, has mixed interpretations on a college campus. That is, its definition when applied to crimes occurring in residence halls can easily be confused with the crime of larceny. Larceny is defined as the crime of taking the goods of another person without permission, with the intent of keeping them. Misclassification frequently occurs when student property is stolen from residence halls. The Clery Act classifies theft in a residence hall as “burglary” until the thief is known to be a roommate or invited guest. The Pennsylvania State law calls such a theft “larceny”, implying that if the thief was in the building, he/she was a resident or invited guest. Such a slight nuance may cause one to question how university police departments can classify a crime as either when it is not known whether or not the thief belonged on the premises or not.
Such a conflict is what Chief Bicking says caused the number of reported burglaries in the years 2003 and 2004 to jump from two before the reclassification, to forty-five afterwards:
“We classified burglaries as [.] when there was a theft in a residence hall; if we did not know who committed the theft, we carried it as a larceny. We should have assumed it was someone outside who didn’t have a right to get inside, so it should’ve been carried as a burglary.”
Kerkstra’s piece contemplated how misleading the misclassifications could have been to current students and their families, along with the numerous potential students considering their application to West Chester University. Chief Bicking explained that the campus crime reports that his department submitted to the university’s admissions department, to be viewed by potential students, had the correct number of total crimes, while some may have been misclassified.
“I don’t want anyone to think that we accept this mistake.” Bicking said, “That’s not what we’re about. As soon as we found out about it, we started telling people, ‘Hey, we made this mistake, we fixed it, but you need to know we made this mistake.'” The Department of Public Safety hired an independent consultant to verify that the new changes were correct and being implemented properly. Bicking also voluntarily briefed the Student Government Association on Tuesday, January 24, 2006.
Students on campus generally agree that public safety is helpful and that they feel safe. Sophomore Laura Ness feels as though a better system is needed to aid schools. “Yes we need to label our crimes properly when they’re reported, but we also need a set of standards that is not confusing and conflicting so we can label them properly,” she said.
In the end, crime at West Chester University remains unvaried. The 45 burglaries recorded in 2003 and 2004 falls substantially lower than many other area university figures. For further information on campus crime data contact the Department of Public Safety. The full Philadelphia Inquirer article may be viewed at www.philly.com/mld/inquirer.