F for Felony

Why parents never hear about a shocking number of college campus crimes

by Winnie Atterbury and Stacia Freidman

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In the early morning hours, a Penn student with long auburn hair walks quickly across the South Street Bridge, plugged into her iPod, singing along to music only she can hear. A man in an orange hoodie runs up behind her, shoves her against the railing and presses the barrel of a gun to her neck. She screams. He tells her to shut up or he'll shoot. She is the first of five females to be sexually assaulted and robbed in University City in November 2006.

None of these assaults will be included in Penn's Annual Crime Report.

Here's why.

Instead of reporting every crime committed within walking distance of the campus, federal and state law mandates colleges and universities report crimes that occur only on "official campus property" and on "adjacent public property." While University of Pennsylvania Police actively patrol from Market Street to Baltimore Avenue and from 30th to 43rd Street, their crime reports stop where their property ends. If a student is beaten, knifed and left for dead a block away, it doesn't count.

Using boundaries that reflect the university's legal liability, these campus crime reports camouflage the true crime rate, especially in trigger-happy Philly, where the murder count is rising fast.

Not that long ago, campus crime wasn't a huge issue. It happened, but colleges and universities kept it to themselves. That changed in 1986 when a blond freshman with a cameo profile walked into her dorm at Lehigh University and caught a stranger in her room. Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered. She was 19. (A man named Josoph Henry was convicted of Clery's rape and murder and was sentenced to death. His case is currently under appeal.)

A graduate of the Agnes Irwin School in Rosemont and a nationally ranked tennis player, Clery had wanted to go to Tulane University in New Orleans. The school had an excellent tennis program, but Clery's older brothers attended Tulane and they brought home stories of grisly campus crimes. Several professors and a co-ed had been murdered.

So Clery opted for "safety" and chose Lehigh, in Bethlehem. It was less than an hour from her Main Line home and light years away from big-city crime. As it turned out, there had been 38 previous attacks at Lehigh in the past three years, but who knew? Not Clery or her parents.

In the aftermath of their daughter's murder, Connie and Howard Clery moved from grief to the pursuit of justice. The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (known as the Jeanne Clery Act) was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. It requires all federally funded colleges and universities to publish an annual crime report containing three years worth of statistics and to alert students to ongoing incidences on campus. When parents of prospective students look at the Annual Crime Report, they are reassured. The numbers are low. Compared to 10, 15 years ago when University City was considered the Wild Wild West and Temple students were regularly mugged in restrooms, it would seem everything is under control.

When they visit, they see gleaming new student housing, bright lights and legions of uniformed security patrols. What they don't see are the crack addicts, rapists and gun-toting juveniles a whistling distance from their kid's dorm.

And they don't see the daily crime log:

November 9, 2006, a robbery pattern has emerged mostly on the western end of the Penn patrol boundaries. All the victims are female and college-age. The weapon being used by the suspect is a screwdriver. The geographic boundaries in which these crimes occurred extend from: 40th to 48th Streets, and Pine to Baltimore; additionally, one incident occurred in the 3400 block of Baring Street.

The Clery Act obligates colleges and universities to post daily crime logs and make them available to students, but not to distribute them to prospective students or to even notify them of their existence. They are enough to give any parent angina. (A typical Penn weekly crime log in 2006 shows one assault and eight thefts.) The problem: finding them. "It took me at least half an hour before I came up with Penn's crime log," said Philadelphia attorney Suzanne Fluhr, whose son is a college freshman. "The incident report provides useful information, but it is week by week and does not provide a compiled picture over time."

On February 20 and 21, 2006, two Drexel students and an alumnus were assaulted in three separate incidences in Powelton Village and Mantua by juveniles carrying 2x4s the length of baseball bats. The victims suffered minor contusions.

These detailed incident reports are posted as they occur, and then they are gone. They are not archived online. Penn's staff newspaper Almanac (www.upenn.edu/almanac) offers backdated searches of incident reports by the week, but they are stripped-down versions, lacking the details of the original incident alert.

The only way to view detailed campus incident reports for, say, the last month or year, is to go to the university's security headquarters and request them. That's a stretch for the average student whose mind is on passing quantum physics, and it's a daunting prospect for the average parent who's scrambling just to keep up with tuition payments.

February 7, 2007, 7:55 pm, 1700 W. Diamond. Female complainant reported being approached by a male who placed what appeared to be a knife against her neck and demanded her purse and money. The male reached around the complainant, placed his hand inside her pants and groped her. The man fled after taking the complainant's purse containing $200 and a cell phone.

Capt. Bob Lowell, commander of Temple's investigation unit, explained, "The Clery Act requires us to make incident reports available to the public. We keep the last 60 days on file in the office. If someone wants to see the reports for the past year, we have to provide it within 48 hours of their request." These are statistics concerned parents should be seeing. But are they?

According to Lowell, "The only requests we've had came from the student newspaper and a researcher."

The federally mandated Clery Act divides campus crime into nine categories; the state-required campus crime report, however, breaks it down into 26. For instance, while the Clery Act asks for the number of "drug-related violations," the state subdivides it into separate categories for marijuana, cocaine, opium, etc. Basically, colleges and universities keep three sets of books: one for the feds, one for the state, and the one that tells the real story — the police incident report.

Three days after the Virginia Tech shooting, campus security officials from 200 colleges and universities met at the Doubletree Hotel in Center City for a previously scheduled conference on reporting crime sponsored by Security on Campus Inc., a nonprofit organization run by the Clery family.

U.S. Attorney Pat Meehan told them, "There are 33 rape victims per 1,000 students every nine months." Since Penn and Temple have 20,000 students each, by Meehan's calculation, that would translate to more than 1,200 rapes a year.

EYES IN THE SKY: Penn, which has the largest private police force in the state, has 450 cameras trained on the campus. Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Ironically, one of the most effective tools for tracking crime in our city was created on Penn's campus. In 2001, grad students in the Cartographic Modeling Lab designed Philadelphia Crime Base (PCB), a Web site that pinpoints the exact number and type of crimes in every section of the City. PCB (www.cml.upenn.edu/crimebase) was created in response to a request from the Philadelphia Police, who were overwhelmed with requests for crime statistics from the media and public.

PCB enables anyone with Internet access to zoom in on crime data by police precinct, ZIP code or Census block. It's so accurate that you can track the number of stolen vehicle registration sticker tags on your block. Using PCB, you can also quickly identify crime stats by police districts.

Penn is in the 18th Precinct, which reports an average of 5,263 "serious" incidents per year (excluding homicide and rape).

Drexel, in the 16th Precinct, reports an average of 2,830 serious incidents.

Temple falls into three precincts, the 22nd, 23rd and 26th, averaging 4,000 incidents a year. Granted, precinct stats give an expanded geographic picture, but let's face it: Crime walks and so do students.

"PCB does not provide statistics on rapes or homicides. They are grouped in with aggravated assault," explained Dennis Culhane, Ph.D., director of the Cartographic Modeling Lab and professor of Social Welfare Policy. "The database is generated by police incident reports; homicides and rapes are not usually determined until after an investigation."

A University City resident and chairman of the Penn Division of Public Safety, Culhane described the database his lab designed for the Philadelphia Police. "It's a geographic mapping tool," he says. "They are literally looking at crime patterns on a daily basis to see if a particular criminal is moving from one section of the city to another."

The incident maps are not available to the public. When asked if these maps might help students determine which areas of West Philly are safest when looking for housing, Culhane said, "The risk of that is that it reinforces certain boundaries and perpetuates them."

In recent years, Penn, Temple and Drexel have vastly upgraded their security divisions with manpower and technology that rival midsize municipalities. PennComm is the high-tech nerve center of Penn's Department of Public Safety. Inside the one-story, blue building at 4040 Chestnut St., Penn Police maintain virtual patrol, watching over the campus 24/7 via CCT (Closed Circuit TV) cameras with the ability to zoom in for close-ups. Penn has the largest private police force in the commonwealth, backed up by hundreds of blue light emergency phones, 450 cameras and enough street lighting to identify the campus from Mars.

"What happened in Virginia won't happen at Penn," said Maureen Rush, VP for Public Safety. "In an emergency situation, we can lock down most buildings with the touch of a button." Rush chairs a monthly University City Public Safety meeting attended by 50 to 60 community "stakeholders," including the DA's Office and the liquor control board.

"I'd put Penn up against any institution regarding its security program," added Rush, whose annual $21 million budget buys a lot of technology and manpower. Yet, there are some things that money can't buy. Ten Penn police officers have been assaulted since the start of this year, the highest number in more than a decade.

Temple University's Campus Safety Department is equally geared up with more than 400 police and security officers and 285 security cameras. Taking a proactive approach, the university turned its Annual Security Report into an impressive marketing tool. The four-color, 25-page glossy magazine titled Campus Safety & You was written and designed in-house under the supervision of Carl S. Bittenbender, executive director of Campus Safety Service. The statistics appear in large, easy-to-read type. In 2005, they reported no murders, six rapes, three aggravated assaults and 15 robberies. Compared to Penn, it's a cakewalk.

A 26-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department, Bittenbender said, "I want people to read our report. We print 60,000 a year and send them to every prospective student and employee. If someone comes to an open house, we give them a copy."

The aim of the slick magazine is to seduce the leery. It even has a center spread of a campus security employee wearing nothing but a gold medallion. Actually, the medallion is a police badge worn by Jake, the handsome black Labrador retriever whose job it is to sniff out bombs at the Liacouras Center prior to events.

Bittenbender takes a paternalistic view of his position due to his other working title: Dad. "My daughter has lived on campus at Temple for four years," he explains.

Temple, which once had the stigma of being a "commuter college," has doubled its on-campus housing in the last 10 years. Nine thousand students live within walking distance, a number that was unthinkable a decade ago. Bittenbender pointed to a former industrial site at 10th and Montgomery streets, recently converted to student housing. "That's where my daughter lives." He waited a beat, then added, "on the first floor."

In part, students are responsible for their own safety on any campus. Jogging alone in the pre-dawn hours, drinking themselves into a coma and leaving doors unlocked is asking for trouble. Security on Campus Inc. runs education programs to raise student awareness on staying safe, staying alive. They are particularly concerned about the high incidence of alcoholism and its relationship to date rape.

In her Daily Pennsylvanian column last November, Penn senior Michelle Dubert wrote, "Crime feels distant until it happens ... to you personally." While she credits Penn with plunking down another $5 million for campus security, she said, "Student safety is not just the responsibility of the Department of Public Safety."

Referring to a recent campus poll, Dubert noted that 67 percent of students surveyed had never taken advantage of Penn's escort service. Most didn't know the blue light emergency phones existed. Dubert concluded, "We don't live in a vacuum. This campus is not gated from the rest of the city."

SAFETY PATROL: "My daughter has lived on campus at Temple for four years," says Carl S. Bittenbender, director of the university's Campus Safety Service. Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

For many Penn students, Temple isn't even on the map. Temple students, however, keep score.

"Penn has more crime," said Linh Chia, a Temple sophomore. "Being Ivy League, you'd assume it's safe but it's not."

Penn's reputation as a crime hot zone is common knowledge even among students at suburban colleges. When this reporter asked a journalism class at Arcadia University in Glenside which campus is more dangerous, Temple or Penn, the response was unanimous: Penn.

There are several factors that make the Ivy League campus more vulnerable to crime.

Temple is compact; Penn sprawls out.

Temple students tend to be locals, familiar with the city. Most Penn students are from out of state.

Then, there's the money factor. Penn students have more. (You won't see many Temple students dining at Rouge.) Parents of Penn students shell out $30,000 a year and that doesn't include room, board and books. Forty-four percent of the Class of 2010 attended private school. While it's difficult to imagine an upper-middle-class couple dropping their precious 17-year-old child in any urban ghetto, armed with nothing but an iPod, that is what happens every September at Penn. To muggers, it's a cash crop that keeps on giving.

With Temple's comparatively low tuition ($10,000 for Pennsylvania residents) and 17.1 percent African-American population, North Philly residents tend to view it as "their" college. Many work at the university and send their children there. While students might speculate which Philadelphia campus is the safest, the numbers point to Drexel.

"We extended Public Safety Patrols to Spring Garden Street in 2005 as a result of increased crime in the off-campus community," said Bernard Gollotti, senior associate vice president of the Drexel Public Safety Department. The area is patrolled by officers on foot, bikes, cars and Segways. Gollotti added that Drexel president Dr. Constantine Papadakis encourages students to be "entrepreneurial and innovative" concerning their safety.

Safety is unquestionably a priority at Penn, Temple and Drexel. The schools have spared no expense and, looking at the statistics, there is less crime now than 10 years ago.

But for all their vigilance, 24/7 patrols, security cameras, stadium lighting and state-of-the-art technology, crime happens. Apartments and cars are burglarized. Students are robbed, beaten and raped. And sometimes, murdered.

On the condition of anonymity, a Penn employee and 30-year resident of University City said, "Things may look different, but they really haven't changed much at all. On campus, Penn is creating an environment that looks good to prospective students and their parents. It has the chain stores they are used to seeing in their own communities and the uniformed security force that is supposed to make them feel safe. But crime continues to happen on a daily basis, even with the gentrification; 40th Street is dangerous because it's the place where the haves and the have-nots come face to face. I think Penn has made a valiant attempt to 'fix' 40th Street, but I'm not sure it's fixable. As long as wealthy people live right next to the poor."

Poverty will not go away with the next mayoral election. Neither will crime. As long as our colleges and universities are located in volatile neighborhoods, parents of prospective students will have to look beyond the high-tech security systems to the harsh realities of city life. They will have to ask the tough questions.

One of the first women on Philadelphia's police force and the parent of a 12-year-old daughter, Maureen Rush said, "I would want to look at municipal crime reports. I would want to see everything. " If Rush looked at our city's municipal report, she would see 406 murders in 2006 and every indication that this year will be a record breaker. After all, this is Philadelphia, the murder capital of the nation.

(editorial@citypaper.net)