When the California State Auditor scrutinized Ohlone Community College’s crime statistics a year ago, it found the school was simultaneously underreporting some violent offenses while inflating its count of others.
Within the college’s public safety records, auditors discovered two sexual assaults on its campuses in Fremont and Newark from 2007 that were missing from the data Ohlone released to the federal government. The college’s own employees ultimately added a third previously unreported forcible rape to its figures.
“We went through and did a hand check of every report to make sure that we were accurate,” said Steve Osawa, Ohlone’s chief of police services, “and found even one that the auditors missed.”
Meanwhile, the college had reported 18 aggravated assaults, though only one actually took place at the school.
Ohlone is among the six California universities and colleges the state auditor checked [PDF] for compliance with the Clery Act. All six schools were violating the federal statute, which requires higher education institutions to collect statistics documenting certain types of criminal activity on their campuses and distribute the information in an annual report.
The U.S. Education Department can fine any university that receives federal financial aid dollars up to $27,500 for each violation.
Many colleges have struggled to follow the act in the 20 years since it became law.
A few allegedly try to defy it. Marshall University is the most recent, accused by the student newspaper of fraudulent recordkeeping.
The California schools cited for erroneous numbers continue “working toward” full compliance, said Margarita Fernandez, a spokeswoman for the state auditor.
Clery’s rules on how to classify different types of assault, and whether to include an off-campus incident, caused a litany of inaccurate crime numbers at the schools.
Osawa said Ohlone’s campus police were using crime reporting guidelines established by the FBI. Following those instructions, sexual battery does not fall in the same category as rape. Clery’s regulations say the opposite.
A majority of the mistakes required only small adjustments to the figures schools had published. But in some instances, the prescribed fixes halved rates of certain types of campus crime.
CSU Fresno originally reported 18 aggravated assaults in 2007. However, eight of them technically took place off-campus, either a short distance from the school or a student organization’s private property (fraternity and sorority houses).
The university’s updated crime statistics now claim just 10 aggravated assaults.
Auditors understood the motivation behind some of the over reporting, as excluding crimes at fraternity houses arguably mischaracterizes the state of campus safety.
The solution is simple, the report states:
If institutions wish to disclose crime statistics for off-campus areas that the Clery Act does not require, they should clearly distinguish them from those statistics that the Clery Act does require so that students and staff can make fair comparisons with the crime statistics reported by other institutions.
UC Berkeley and UCLA already detail these off-campus crimes in a separate category. The schools were not included in the audit.
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