Midterms are just around the corner, but safety on campus has already received an A.
Columbia on-campus crime and incidents may be on the downturn, according to the 2009 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report.
The document—released to the campus Wednesday by Vice President for Public Safety James McShane—includes information about incidents reported between 2006 and 2008.
Overall, on-campus crime and incidents seem to be down, though administered discipline for alcohol and drugs has jumped significantly. But it’s unclear whether this means drug and alcohol use has increased on campus, or whether disciplinary actions have simply increased, in what has been labeled the war on fun.
According to McShane, the University has received an A safety grade and is ranked 21st in a national Reader’s Digest survey on campus safety.
“Columbia’s campuses and the surrounding areas are safe and have an extremely low crime rate for an urban university,” McShane wrote.
The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Crime Statistics Act requires that universities publish an annual report by Oct. 1 that discloses three years of campus crime and fire safety statistics.
All University buildings meet or exceed the New York City fire safety requirements, according to McShane.
The statistics, which encompass crimes on campus or in adjacent areas, included those collected by Public Safety and were based on crimes reported directly to their department, as well as information from local police precincts.
There have been no hate crimes officially identified in the last three years, despite campus uproars of potential bias incidents, most notably in the case of Madonna Constantine, an African-American professor formerly at Teachers College who found a noose on her door in 2008. Still, the report noted that in 2008, six counts of vandalism that took place on campus buildings were deemed bias incidents. Yesterday, an internal Public Safety memo noted the finding of a “criminal mischief incident involving bias in the men’s restroom” in the International Affairs Building, which included the drawing of a swastika inside a circle.
Public safety disciplines for alcohol and drugs—divided into two separate categories—appeared more than any other in the last three years. Disciplinary incidents for alcohol in 2008 spiked from 2006—from 61 incidents to 192, all of which appear from the report to have happened in the residence halls—and disciplinary actions for drugs also increased over the past three years, from 20 disciplinary incidents in 2006 to 91 in 2008. But 2008 had no drug-related arrests.
On-campus burglaries appear to have decreased: 87 were reported in 2008, as compared to 132 in 2006.
Forcible sex offensives and aggravated assault also appear to have hit a three-year low. But with forcible offensives declining from eight in 2007 to five in 2008, and aggravated assault from nine incidents to five, the decreases, while worth being noted, are not necessarily significant.
Since 2006, there have been no arrests for weapons on campus, nor reports of arson.
There have been two reported murders in the past couple of years on public property close to Columbia.
Public Safety reported no crimes in the last three years at either the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory or Columbia’s Nevis Laboratories, though the Columbia University Medical Center reported 37 counts of burglary on campus and four counts of aggravated assault. Ten more counts of aggravated assault were reported in 2008 not on campus, but in the area.
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