ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 12, 1996 TAG: 9612120047
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
MOST CAMPUS CRIMES tend to be carried out by students against other students and usually involve property.
With three out of four campuses employing police officers with arrest power, the nation's colleges have far lower violent and property crime rates than the country as a whole, the Justice Department reported Wednesday.
In its first study of campus law enforcement, the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics found that there were 64 violent crimes and 2,141 property crimes reported to police for every 100,000 students in 1994, the most recent year with complete data.
By comparison, in the nation as a whole that year, there were 716 violent crimes and 4,656 property crimes for every 100,000 residents.
The bureau surveyed public and private four-year institutions with 2,500 or more students last year. These schools enrolled four out of five of the nation's nearly 9 million college students.
``The reason the campus crime rates are so low is that colleges and universities have recruited huge numbers of security personnel to protect students,'' said Jack Levin, a professor of criminology and sociology at Northeastern University in Boston. ``You can't sell an expensive college education to parents who believe their children aren't going to be safe, so colleges in urban settings have become armed camps. And it's working very well.''
Colleges and universities last year employed nearly 11,000 full-time sworn police officers, who had been given general arrest powers by a state or local government, the statistics bureau found.
In addition, campus law enforcement agencies employed nearly 10,000 non-sworn security officers, who did not have arrest power.
Overall, three-fourths of the schools had campus police officers with arrest power, including 93 percent of the public institutions and 43 percent of the private ones.
Police officers are armed at 81 percent of the public campuses and 34 percent of the private campuses, the bureau found.
Nationwide, the cost of campus law enforcement averaged $109 per student, $181 at private schools and $94 at public ones.
``College students are economically better off than society as a whole, and they have bought into the system or they wouldn't be spending four years studying,'' said Levin, who has studied campus crime. "But that alone doesn't explain the lower campus crime rates, because college students are in the most crime-prone years.''
``Most crimes on campus are committed by students against one another,'' Levin said. He said these crimes can be reduced by security measures because they are more often spontaneous than premeditated.
Property crime is usually someone stealing a purse or computer, Levin said.
Average large campuses reported 1,000 property crimes. The smaller campuses reported an average of 71 property crimes.
Two-thirds of the campus police forces ran date rape prevention programs, and half had alcohol and drug abuse programs. More than one-third provided special victim assistance.
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