Do Campus Crime Statistics Make You Safer?
Since the early-1990s the Federal government, through the US Department of Education, requires more than 6000 colleges and universities to publish an annual report disclosing their campus security policies and three years of selected crime statistics related to that college or university. US Department of Education collects this data and makes it available on web sites and in published reports. You can see the data for any particular institution that is required to report. You can sort the data by the size of institutional enrollment, or you can check institutions by states, or by the type of instructional programs they offer. This is an impressive collection of data but it begs the question of whether or not it actually means anything. It’s difficult or impossible to prove a negative but you have to wonder if the millions of man-hours that have been spent in collecting, compiling, and reporting this data has made one college student, anywhere, safer. Crimes occur in big cities, small
