An unhappy league table
This really is true crime on campus. Business Insider has produced a report on what it describes as the “Most Dangerous Colleges In America”. Drawing on FBI data, the piece produces a league table of the worst affected institutions in terms of crime. It makes grim reading. However, the results are contested by some of the institutions named who observe not only that some of the crimes happen in areas nearby their campuses and not on them but also that the reporting of crime is something that they encourage in order to improve detection and clear up. In other words, the development of a league table is not helpful or fair. The report notes:
The FBI’s Unified Crime Report identified 2,696 violent crime incidents and 87,160 property crime incidents on college campuses in 2011. This is a controversial report due to, among other reasons, how some colleges include data on non-campus areas. Nonetheless, the FBI considers it a valid way to “shed light on crime in schools, colleges, and universities.”
To put the data in context, we ranked the most dangerous colleges. We averaged crime data per capita from 2008 to 2011 for schools with enrollment over 10,000. Schools were ranked based on a combination of violent crime rank and property crime rank, with violent crime weighted four times higher
I won’t list the institutions here but I do think the data shows a huge difference in the nature of crime on campuses in the UK and the USA.
