Index Crims in College Campuses

Topic #1

Compare index crimes to a least five universities or colleges in the state of Florida for at least the last five years.

Since 1992, Universities and Colleges around the United States, where required to publish crime statistics that where reported every year on their college’s websites. After researching this topic, I found five different universities in the state of Florida where the campus police department posted their index crimes on their departments’ website. These five universities I researched included the University of Central Florida, the University of Florida, the University of South Florida, The University of North Florida, and Florida State University. From the last decade, colleges and universities in Florida became more stringent on their campus security. Almost every university and college in the state of Florida contains their own campus police department. These campus police mainly focus on providing a high quality, professional crime prevention, protection, and law enforcement services to maintain and promote safety of their campus’s property and associated locations. Furthermore the campus police departments facilitates the achievement of the academic, research, and public service mission of the University through its safety and security programs, the protections of individual rights, and reducing the fear of crime.

Under the Jeanne Clery Act, the United States department of education collects statistics from more then 6,000 colleges and universities in the United States. The Jeanne Clery Act states that all colleges and universities are to disclose annual information on their campus’s crime and security policies. The crimes the police departments disclose include the Uniform Crime Reports for part one offences and the Uniform Crime Reports for part two offences. The campus police also show other types of crimes such as hate crimes, ethnic crimes, religious crimes, etc… All five of the Universities and Colleges I researched the number of crimes in each university varies from the other. This is maybe due to the size of the university the police patrol and can be because of the location the university is located. In contrast to the each college, the number of crimes in one university tends to stay constant and may have a minimal increase in the proceeding years.

In each universities crime reports, the number of part one offences such as homicide, rape, arson, etc… is very low compared to the other offences which include liquor law violations, drug law violations, and gun law violations which have a higher rate of reports. For instance, at the University of Central Florida from 2002 to 2004, there have only been 10 part one crimes reported