Crime reports weak

Recently the Daily Forty-Niner ran a series of articles and columns regarding on campus crimes, and release of crime statistics for the campus.

The U.S. Department of Education announced that Cal State University is going to be investigated for not reporting sex crime data. Unfortunately it appears that this is not only a problem at Cal State Long Beach, it seems to be system-wide.

While sexual assaults on this campus average only one or two per year, the fact that these infrequent crimes are apparently being pushed under the rug throughout the CSU.

The Sacramento Bee reported that U.C. San Diego and Cal State Fullerton both compile sexual assault statistics into the general category of physical abuse. That is an easy way to hide from flack regarding over-publicized sex crime data.

The fact is that college campuses are places we go to enlighten ourselves. How can we be expected to learn and get our money's worth from our universities if we cannot trust them to fully inform us about the public safety on campus?

It is a travesty to think that campuses are able to hide crime statistics from the students they are supposed to be educating. As students we are entitled to know about the safety on our campus.

No student I know would willingly choose a university that has high crime rates, especially in sexual assault cases. That being said, it is little wonder that these universities either willingly or unwittingly hide these facts from students.

When this investigation ends, it will be interesting to see what changes occur on our campuses. As it is the CSU releases the Students' Right To know Report once a year, but that doesn't seem to be good enough. Universities are still shrouding facts regarding on-campus crimes.

The University Police here say they have no reason to hide anything and they can only report crimes that have been reported to them. Sure, students and faculty have to report crimes in order for the police to do anything about them. But it seems that even reported crimes are being shrouded by some campus police organizations.

What is needed is more strict guidelines and accountability on the part of the campus police. Student victims also need to be more willing to come forward and report crimes.

Unfortunately, only one of those things is plausible. Victims are not really going to be willing to come forward due to the fear and trauma stemming from the crime. So maybe we can look forward to campus police being more forthcoming with information regarding campus crimes.

The only way we can create safety on college campuses is to inform the campus community of the dangers that exist on the campus. The only way students can take preventative measures to deter crime is to know what crimes we have to prevent.