2023 Community Safety Data Reveals Uptick in Medical Responses, Building Patrols

Crime statistics collected from Reed’s online community safety blotter reveal a rise in CSO building patrols this semester, and, more concerningly, a slight but significant uptick in medical assistance responses.

While overall medical responses have increased only slightly — with 83 reports this academic year compared to 74 last year — the distribution of these reports has changed, and it seems that incidents have become more common.

Note that there were seven weeks in the 2021-22 school year in which no medical incidents were reported. Meanwhile, there have only been four such medical-assistance free weeks this school year, with at least one medical incident occurring in every other week. While it is important to note that two of these weeks, the weeks ending on April 4th and 11th, 2021, did not have posted blotters, and thus cannot necessarily be taken as an indication that no medical incidents occurred during that time, the seven medical-free weeks still represent a significant difference from this year’s statistics.

In addition, while comparable spikes in medical incidents occur in the early spring of both years, this past March brought significantly more medical incidents than in 2022 – with 17 medical assistance reports last month compared to 8 in March 2021. The spike in medical responses in late August, at the beginning of the school year, is also worthy of note, but cannot be compared to previous years, as no blotters from this time in 2021 are available online.

Meanwhile, CSO building patrols have also increased this semester, a change Community Safety Director Gray Granger attributes to better staffing. “We have not intentionally increased overall patrol activity,” Granger said over email, “We do, however, have more CSOs available in the field in the past few months as we have successfully filled some vacant positions. … While one patrol [per] residence hall [per] CSO shift is our goal, on shifts where we may have only one CSO working, they may not get to all buildings in a given shift. While this is not our goal and not typical, it does happen, so better overall CSO staffing equals more patrols.”

In more general statistics, an analysis of the timing of CSO incident reports, as reported in online Blotters, revealed that such incidents tend to cluster either late at night, or, bizarrely, at noon.

Seen above, incident reports across all years typically reach peak frequency around either noon or midnight, and more generally cluster in the late afternoon. Few incidents are reported before lunchtime, and very few between 4:00 am and 8:00 am.

For more information, and a complete CSV of all the incident reports I was able to scrape from past blotters, see the GitHub repository for this project.