When Jeanne Clery was a freshman at Lehigh University in 1986, she wasn’t aware that 38 violent crimes had been committed on her quiet Pennsylvania campus in the three years before her arrival.
Her family learned the statistic a few years later, after 19-year-old Clery was raped and murdered in her dorm room during a botched robbery. The doors to the dormitory had been propped open, allowing her killer free access to the building.
The creation of the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act was a success for her family, which began the campus crime prevention group Security on Campus Inc., after her death.
But Howard Clery, Jeanne Clery’s brother and executive director of the family organization, is concerned the crime reporting standards set by the act could be weakened by an upcoming regulatory review.
The Fed. Up campaign seeks to reform the Higher Education Act, which includes the Clery act. Some university police departments have said regulations for reporting the number of crimes on campus to the Department of Education are too difficult to understand.
“It is a threat,” Howard Clery said. “How serious of a threat I’m really not sure of that. Crime on college campus is fairly high and it’s been rising. It’s all an image thing for some colleges.”
U.S. Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., who created the Fed. Up movement, has received more than 3,100 responses from universities and other programs around the country interested in cutting the red tape out of the 800-page Higher Education Act.
Bob Cochran, McKeon’s chief of staff, said the program could become legislation by January 2003.
“The regulations that are written with the act are so burdensome or miss the intent of Congress,” Cochran said. “There are people there on the front lines of higher education that have to implement the laws that have great suggestions to make it better.”
Cochran said the possible legislation is not likely to involve any controversial changes to the act.
“There are probably some things that can be changed, eliminated and tweaked,” he said. “We would move this only under an unanimous consent process where Republicans and Democrats can agree.”
But Howard Clery said reformation of the Clery act could make it easier for schools to avoid telling the complete truth about crimes on campus.
Ninety-seven percent of colleges met the deadline to turn in crime statistics to the Department of Education in 2000. About 125 schools had not registered or reported, but about 3,600 had.
“It’s a significant amount of crime in question here,” Howard Clery said. “We’ve come a long way. There are some schools that aren’t helping, but most are doing a really good job reporting more crimes.
“We realized this was a problem on every campus when my sister died.”
Some campus police units have complained the standards are too vague for reporting crimes occurring on campus/city boundary streets and crimes that are discussed with campus counseling centers instead of police.
Howard Clery and campus officials around the country have suggested the creation of a Department of Education compliance office that would coach schools about how to report crime - and keep the reports honest.
Campus officials at the University of Michigan, which is divided by city streets, have had some difficulties coming into compliance with the act.
“There are some clarifications that might be made that might make the communication smoother,” said Diane Brown, a spokeswoman for U-M’s Department of Public Safety. “I’d just like it to be one consistent message that addresses these various inconsistencies.”
But MSU police officials say reporting campus crime isn’t difficult for them. The Department of Police and Public Safety was one of about 400 colleges that reported crime statistics to the Uniform Crime Report before campuses were required to submit statistics.
MSU includes crimes committed on boundary streets with campus crime statistics.
“The legislation (for the Clery act) was good,” MSU police Capt. Dave Trexler said. “We’ve always had high standards. It’s a new system, and they’re going to have to work the bugs out.”
Jamie Gumbrecht can be reached at gumbrec1@msu.edu.
