UW-Madison freshman Richard Garner was recently a victim of a larceny theft on the 10th floor of Ogg Residence Hall's West tower.
""I had a headache one night and I had left from the first floor to my room and I used my key to get to the 10th floor. Upon getting to the 10th floor, I went to the restroom then went to my room,"" Garner said. ""And I woke the next morning and my moped keys were missing.""
Thefts are on the rise at UW-Madison, according to statistics released so far in 2006.
UW-Madison has totaled 501 larcenies, 39 burglaries and five robberies since of the beginning of the year. This is a startling jump from the past three years' larceny totals, which were 425 in '05, 429 in '04 and 358 in '03.
Larceny statistics are not required to be included in annual campus safety reports by the federal government and may be alarming to college students and their families.
Garner said his room keys were found in the restroom the next day, but the absence of his moped key forced him to obtain a replacement.
""More or less, I had somewhat trusted people on my floor because they seemed like good people and upon these missing, everybody says they don't know who did it. I just asked them to give them back and nobody gave them back so you just kind of lose trust,"" Garner said.
Under a 1990 law known as the Clery Act, schools must report statistics on burglaries and robberies—but not larcenies—to the U.S. Education Department and in their annual reports.
The law, named after a student who was sexually assaulted and murdered in 1986 at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, was fought for by the Clery family after they had discovered that Lehigh's students had not been informed about 38 violent crimes that occurred in the three years before their daughter's murder. The law is intended to provide accurate assessments of campus crime for applicants, students and their parents.
But according to an Oct. 23 article in the Wall Street Journal, a comparison of recent Clery reports to the FBI data showed that colleges may be portraying themselves as safer than they actually are.
For example, Northeastern University in Boston acknowledged they excluded many unsolved thefts from burglary numbers submitted to the Education Department, despite federal guidance to submit all thefts.
University of Wisconsin Police Department Captain Dale Burke said he does not agree with this practice of exclusion and notes crimes by whether they were reported, not whether they were solved.
""So as soon as somebody calls up and reports something, that gets added to the count,"" Burke said.
Although Clery was originally unsupported by private schools, statistics revealed in the article show public schools do not disclose complete crime records either. For instance, the University of Michigan reported only 25 burglaries and totaled 908 larcenies.
The House of Representatives twice, in 1990 and 1998, voted to include larceny among the crimes that colleges would have to report, but the Senate version of the bill did not include the requirement and prevailed both times, the article said.
Burke made assumptions about why resistance may have occurred.
""A lot of the initial resistance I think was from private institutions that were immune from open records requirements and they viewed it as kind of bad public relations to advertise crime on their campuses,"" Burke said. ""We're not afraid of informing people, but we don't want people to take the information that we're giving them and have misconceptions of what those numbers mean.""
Nobody wants people to be scared away from coming to an institution because of the numbers,"" he added. ""But on the other hand, we don't want them to assume that things are safer than they really are either.""
Under pressure from Congress and Security on Campus Inc., a nonprofit group that lobbied for the Clery Act, about a dozen colleges have owned up to errors in their statistics and paid fines to the Education Department since 1998. These fines can reach up to $25,000 per violation.
The law requires schools to ask deans and other officials in charge of students for tallies of sex crimes reported to them each year, regardless of whether charges were pressed.
Burke also said crimes tend to be underreported by victims on the UW-Madison campus.
""We know that sexual assault is underreported and that's something that we work very hard at trying to get people to come forward,"" he said. ""Whether they come to the police or not is not the most important thing, but we want them to tell somebody so we can get them in the system to get them the help and the resources they need to help recover.""
Crime statistics for the city of Madison Police Department tend to be quite different from those of the UW campus and include larceny as a category separate from burglaries and robberies. According to the '05 annual report, burglaries totaled 1,463, robberies at 336 and larcenies at 5,746.
But the dividing lines between the two areas covered are not so distant. According to Public Information Officer Mike Hanson, MPD covers State Street and Langdon Street, while UWPD is responsible for dorms, university buildings and university facilities.
""I don't think we hold back any information, I think we just try to comply with the requirements of the federal government, whatever those are,"" Associate Dean of Students Elton Crim said.
""You cannot look at Clery statistics and know everything you want to know about crime on a particular campus,"" Burke said. ""What I tell people is that the Clery reports should be used as a starting point for a whole lot of further questions.""
But so far this year, there have already been 74 more reports of larceny on campus than last year's total number, and this number does not include those from the MPD.
""I think if the goal is to educate people on how they can better protect themselves and their property then [larcenies] should be included,"" Burke said.
Garner said he agreed that all statistics should be available to all UW-Madison students and their families.
""I believe people should know what's going on in these dorms."" he said.
