Annual Safety Report Released
On October 7, the Quest received a comment on this story pointing out that it could be read to imply that rape was not a violent crime. This was of course not the paper’s intention and the statement was corrected.
The original Clery report did provide a category of “Sex Offenses” — which includes reports of rape, fondling, statutory rape, and incest — but the category of “major violent crimes” was created by the Quest during the reporting process. The decision to include only murder and manslaughter in this new category may have created the suggestion that rape is not violent. This was in no way the intention of either the writer or the editors of the Quest. We apologize for the miscommunication.
The five editors of the Quest should have recognized this lack of clarity and corrected it before the story went to print. We apologize for not doing so. Our content editors read primarily for language, and we neglected to consider the implication of this phrasing. While the data presented in this article was accurate, an editor’s responsibility is to ensure that an article is clearly worded before print, and we did not fulfill that in this case.
By Sam King
Data visualization by Declan Bradley
The Annual Security and Fire Safety Report, also called the Clery Report, was released Friday, September 29.
The report, which is available to the public online on the Community Safety web page, or provided upon request at the Dispatch Desk at 28 West, details the number and type of crimes reported to Community Safety. The 2023 ASR reports statistics for the prior calendar year, in this case 2022.
This year’s report shows that in the past three years, there were no murders or negligent or nonnegligent manslaughters reported to Community Safety. There were also no reported cases of aggravated assault in 2022, down from five in 2021.
(Note: this originally read: "This year’s report shows that in the past three years, there were no major violent crimes reported to Community Safety. Violent crimes include murder and negligent or nonnegligent manslaughter." This was corrected in accordance with the editors' note above.)
Property crime largely held steady in 2022. The report listed 19 burglaries, compared to 26 in 2021, though vehicular thefts did increase from 11 to 13. There were no reports of robbery, which requires the perpetrator to use fear or violence during the theft as opposed to burglary, which is committed when the victim is away.
Seven sex offenses were reported to Community Safety, including four rapes – up from two in 2021 – and three instances of unwanted fondling.
Community Safety Officers issued 43 disciplinary referrals for liquor violations, down from 53 last year, and 75 drug violations, up substantially from the 50 in 2021. Since Reed does not consider minor drug and alcohol possession a disciplinary action, it is unclear whether these numbers represented all DOA violations or more severe violations. The Quest contacted Community Safety Director Gary Granger for clarification but did not receive a response in time for publication. There were zero drug and alcohol related arrests in 2022.
Dating violence reports rose from zero in 2021 to five in 2022. Stalking cases also increased from three to five. There were zero reports of domestic violence, which requires the victim to be a current or former spouse, cohabitant, or intimate partner of the perpetrator.
Data visualization by Declan Bradley
There were three fires reported on campus last year. One occurred in the Old Dorm Block on February 1 around 1:30 PM, and caused less than one hundred dollars in damage. Another occurred in the Foster/Shultz building on October 4th, at 8:09pm, and caused less than a thousand dollars in damage. Both were ruled accidents. There was one reported arson in 2022, when a jacket was deliberately set on fire in a location near campus.
Finally, there was one hate crime reported in 2022. A racist slur was spray painted on the victim’s vehicle. When asked whether she was satisfied with the current security of campus, Yasodha Gopal, Associate Dean of Student Health and Wellbeing said, “I won’t be satisfied until we are zeroed out in all columns,” and continued, “we also have a deep history with drugs and alcohol … and this is something we all need to continually look at closely together.” Gary Granger, Head of Community Safety said in response to the same question that, “satisfied implies a state of relaxation, so I’ll say that I do not believe we can relax our efforts on any element of our safety programs.”