Should You Send Your Child To A UC Campus?
Campus Safety Group Says Newspaper Investigation
Reveals Unsafe Campuses; Calls For Federal Review

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 25, 2000

SACRAMENTO, CA-A national college and university campus safety organization Security On Campus, Inc. (SOC) is calling into question the safety of all nine University of California system campuses after a "Sacramento Bee" expose revealed system wide violations of a decade old federal campus crime reporting law, the Jeanne Clery Act.

"In our opinion the UC campuses are unsafe based on the report we saw in the Sacramento Bee," said Howard Clery, father of the murdered student the reporting law is named after. Clery, along with his wife Connie, pressured Congress to pass the law and founded the non-profit SOC in 1987.

In a series of articles running Sunday and Monday, the "Sacramento Bee" found that:

• Two-thirds of the campuses, including UC Davis, omitted sexual assaults reported to university sources other than police. Some universities also didn't gather crimes occurring at off-campus sites such as fraternities and those reported to medical centers.

• In some cases, crimes were miscategorized. UC Riverside police say men cannot be raped; UC San Diego classifies sexual assaults under the broad heading of "physical abuse."

• UC Irvine and UC Riverside failed to compile detailed crime statistics as required by the Clery Act. Instead, the campuses used less-exhaustive FBI statistics.

"This type of underreporting robs students of information they need to avoid victimization," said S. Daniel Carter, the vice-president of SOC. "We are calling for a federal investigation so that UC students will not continue to have their safety jeopardized in the name of expediency or protecting a school's image."

The Clery Act, originally known as the Campus Security Act, requires colleges and universities to collect crime information from a wide array of campus officials not just campus police and then make that information available to prospective and current students.

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