The Red and Black

Issue date: 10/6/00 Section: News

The federal government is pushing for campus police across the country accurately to report crimes or else they'll have to pay -- with a fine of $25,000.

Beginning in 1998, an amended version of the campus crime reporting law expanded what information university police would be required to make available to the public, said University spokesman Tom Jackson.

Schools now must post tallies of crimes -- including homicides, rapes, assaults and drug arrests -- on the Department of Education's Web site.

If schools find loopholes in the system to lessen their crime rates, they will be fined.

The amendment came as a result of parents' concern that campus crime reports were not giving a good enough picture of overall campus safety.

But Jackson said the University has reported crime statistics in full since 1969 and was 'one of the first institutions in the country to make that data publicly available.'

In the early 1990s, University administrators also were instrumental in urging the Georgia General Assembly to pass laws expanding reporting requirements, he said.

'You're four times safer on campus than off,' Jackson said. 'Only 18 percent of students live on campus so a lot of crimes happen off campus, and we realized that.'

Jackson said he thinks the law's change two years ago actually hurt the University.

'They tried to make a nationwide adjustment but ended up impairing systems that had found better ways to get statistics out,' he said. 'That's what happened at the University.'

Now University personnel must give Athens-Clarke County police a list of specific addresses to run through a computer if they want to formulate an overall list of off-campus crime.

But it's a burden to include addresses for all students who live off-campus, Jackson said, so University crime statistics only include on-campus crimes, neglecting those that occur downtown and in apartment complexes.

Nancy Zechella, executive director of Safe Campuses Now, said this means students need to be careful when looking at the University's crime statistics.

'They do report more than they have to, but there are so many crimes that students don't know about,' she said. 'So they get a false sense of security.'

Police in Georgia and Tennessee must mark on reports if a person involved in a crime is a University student.

'In other states, the numbers for students get skewed with the rest of the community,' Zechella said. 'But because they have to say (who is a student), we can differentiate.'

Numbers, according to University Police Chief Chuck Horton, only are as good as what people are willing to report.

'I don't think you'll ever get to a point where crime statistics show all crimes,' he said. 'We can only report what is reported to us, and especially with crimes like rape, not all victims come to us.'

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