Closing a loophole in disclosing campus crime

 By Michael Matza

Armed robberies in the shadow of college buildings. A student shot and wounded in September. A researcher stabbed to death walking home from his lab.

Throughout the security crisis at the University of Pennsylvania this fall, worried students have demanded more protection from an administration that has responded on many fronts, including the hiring of more campus police.

How dangerous is the campus? That depends who's counting the crimes. In a federally required report intended to help parents and students evaluate campus safety, university officials listed 18 campus robberies both armed and strong-arm.

It's the same number they reported to the state police in Harrisburg under the Pennsylvania campus-crime law.

Yet an internal Penn printout obtained by the Inquirer and authenticated by university officials shows 181 robberies that year within the 125-square-block area patrolled by the campus police. Why the tenfold difference? It's all in how Penn administrators define the campus, an amorphous sprawl of pedestrian malls and city streets, with boundaries that slice between the ground floors and upper stories of some Penn-owned buildings, and fringe areas that don't fit neatly within the borders of its police patrol area: the Schuylkill west to 43d Street; Market Street south to Baltimore and University Avenues.

The central part of the campus, they say, runs from 33d to 40th Streets. A classroom? A laboratory? A dormitory building? All are "on-campus" locations, and thus crimes committed there are campus crimes, Penn officials say. On the other hand, Penn officials maintain, adjacent public spaces, such as city streets and sidewalks, or properties that the university owns but leases to businesses, like "The 3401 Cafe" food court and "Shops at Penn," in the 3400 block of Walnut Street, or the strip of stores on Walnut between 37th and 38th Streets, are deemed "off-campus" for the purposes of the annual report of crimes that colleges and universities are required to compile by federal law. Such properties are managed by University City Associates Inc., a Penn-controlled real estate holding company founded in 1963.

Although UCA's offices are in the campus administration building, and Penn's treasurer, associate treasurer, and associate vice president for finance are all officers of UCA, UCA properties are deemed off-campus, say Penn police.

Critics say Penn's way of counting crimes is so narrow that it defies common sense and provides misleading information about student safety.

"I would think that anything within the boundaries of the campus would be considered on-campus. It looks like they're just looking for a technical way out," said Rep. Howard P. McKeon (R., Calif.), co-sponsor of a recent U.S. House resolution that urged the U.S. Department of Education to step up its monitoring of the way universities report crime.

Penn says that student safety is its highest priority and that it follows both the letter and spirit of the law, counting crimes the way many other schools do.

"Although money earned by any means that comes back to the general fund could be said to be part of the university's mission, these properties are not used for educational purposes," Penn spokesman Ken Wildes said.

While Penn police respond to all emergency calls in their jurisdiction, the coding of crimes is "done behind the scenes, much like any police department. Incident locations are all looked at and evaluated," said Joseph Weaver, the Penn police lieutenant whose three-member unit does the coding. He cited the private food store and Penn-owned dental offices above it, on 40th Street between Locust and Walnut, as an example. "If something happened on the ground level and we responded . . . we would carry the statistic, but it would be . . . off-campus. The university doesn't control that place. The proprietor controls it. . . . "The Dental Care Center, which is immediately above it, if ... an incident . . . happens . . . there, we carry that as on-campus," Weaver said.

Even inside the department, it's a controversial call. "That's always been a big issue amongst patrol officers. Something that occurs on the sidewalk can be classified as off-campus. . . . That really doesn't make sense to us," said a Penn police officer who asked not to be named. Penn's internal crime count shows how finely the line is sometimes drawn. A report of "Backpack w contents taken" in the 3400 block of Walnut, which many students consider Penn's ground zero at the confluence of Locust Walk, the Van Pelt Library, the administration building and the Jaffe Art History Building was classified "OC" on the printout, meaning an off-campus robbery. An attempted robbery by juveniles who struck the complainant in the 3900 block of Locust Street, near the Penn dormitory called High Rise North, was classified on-campus. When a victim in front of the Walnut Street food court was struck in the head by robbers who fled with cash, Penn police labeled the crime "off-campus."

"That's horrendous," said Suzanne Smith, a mother from New York City on a recent visit to her son Mark, a Penn freshman. Hunting for a place to eat, Smith and her family gathered at the entrance of the food court, which was jammed with hundreds of students. "I have a child here. I'm very concerned. I would consider this the campus," she said.

Merchants in West Philadelphia say Penn police often are the first to respond to incidents in the jurisdiction they share with the city's 18th Police District. When Penn responds or receives information about a crime that the city has handled, the incident is logged in the campus-police blotter, which is open to the public and available for publication in campus media, Penn police officials said. When they label crimes "OC" as they did with more than 90 percent of the 1995 robberies in their patrol area, those crimes go uncounted in the annual survey the federal government has required since the passage of the Student Right-to-Know and Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990. The law, which took effect in 1992, was designed to cure underreporting of campus crimes by image-sensitive schools.

Penn says it complies with both the letter and the spirit of the U.S. law on reporting crimes. The law requires that the survey include murders, sex offenses, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries and motor-vehicle thefts and be released on request to all students, employees, prospective students and prospective employees. Penn officials say the university scrupulously complies by sending the statistics out with admissions applications.

While parents and students don't generally rely on crime data alone to choose a college, the statistics are a growing part of the equation. In a world that can seem dangerous everywhere, "the degree that you consider something like that definitely has to be higher than it used to be," said Jeffrey Waranch, a 1967 Penn grad living in Baltimore, whose daughter Rebecca is a senior at Penn. "I would be concerned no matter where she was. But she's in the heart of a big city. And I've gotten the impression that things are much more dangerous than they used to be," said Waranch.

Asked about locations like Penn's food court, Longanecker said: "If basically it's there to serve students . . . and it is essentially surrounded by the college, I'm not sure I would say that it's off-campus. That's where it gets close."

Absent a specific complaint, the Education Department does not verify university crime statistics. It simply checks that colleges compile them. "Various institutions interpret the regulations in various ways. Although at first glance you look at a law and you say, 'Well, this is pretty clear,' when you sit down and try to apply it to real world situations, different people apply it differently," said Thomas Seamon, Penn's managing director for public safety. "We play by the rules they have given us. We didn't make the rules. We may not even agree with the rules," Seamon said.

University of Cincinnati professor Bonnie Fisher has studied compliance with the law for the National Institute of Justice. Her survey of 785 colleges and universities compared their statistics with independently gathered data from surveys of students at 12 campuses. It did not include Penn. "Statistical information emerging from institutional compliance with the act does not paint an accurate picture of crime on post-secondary campuses," her report concluded. While Fisher's research did not seek to identify how individual colleges interpret the law, Penn's method, she said, may be the norm. "It's NIMBY," she said. "Not in my backyard."

Ben Clery is vice president of Security on Campus, the King of Prussia-based watchdog group founded by his parents after his sister Jeanne was raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dormitory in 1986. Their activism helped bring about the Pennsylvania law.

"How far do administrators want to dice this up?" he said. "Do they want to say that dormitories are necessary for the educational purpose because students need them to study, but we're not going to count the hall bathrooms because no one goes in there to study? "There is certainly a direct relationship between how a school presents its crime statistics and its financial situation. If students and parents feel this isn't such a safe place to send their kids, the first ones to leave are the paying students, the ones who can pay the full freight," Clery said. "For the parents that are really evaluating schools and are using crime as a factor in their selection process, they're being deceived."

As one of the most selective colleges in the United States, Penn has no trouble filling its student body. A record 15,890 students applied for 2,400 places in this year's freshman class. More than half of those students come from outside Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. For someone contemplating enrollment at Penn, data reported far and wide under federal and state right-to-know laws may be a more practical source of information than local campus media.

"One of the many ways the law is gutted is by its application, especially for urban campuses where the difference between whether you're on the sidewalk or on the grass can mean the difference between whether the incident is counted or not," said lawyer Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Washington.

George E. Clisby, Penn's director of administration for public safety, responds. ' "I think part of it is understanding that this is an open campus, that there is a universal easement for people to traverse it," said Clisby. "I think maybe if parents understood that concept there would be a degree of acceptance of what we're proposing." Adds Penn managing director Seamon: "If we sat here . . . and said, 'We need to change this law. There should just be one number that comes out. Anything that happens in this whole patrol area, you should count it,' ... a parent could come back and say, 'Wait a minute, if my child lives at 43d and Locust, it's important if a robbery happens at 44th. They're right. They're right. So how far out do we go? We could continue this argument forever."

There's no arguing at 3736 Walnut St., a Penn-owned storefront managed by UCA. Classical Choice, the new and used compact disc store located there is diagonally across the street from Penn's Gimbel Gymnasium, a few doors down from the Graduate School of Education, around the corner from the campus bookstore, one block east of Penn president Judith Rodin's house.

"I certainly think of it as on the campus," said store manager Jim Wilson, who on Jan. 16, 1995, was forced to hand over $35 after two men robbed him and got away. One stood near the door as a lookout. The other leaned close to the cash register. "This is a stickup," he whispered. Although he never showed a gun, he implied he had one. It was over in an instant.

Customers listening to selections through stereo headphones never even blinked. "They were probably Penn students or faculty," recalled Wilson. "Ninety-five percent of our customers are."

Penn police were the first to respond to another "off campus" crime.

-The Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 25, 1996