UCI Among Schools Cited for Lapses in Crime Reports

UC Irvine and several other campuses have not been complying with federal crime reporting laws, but there is no evidence that the schools covered up campus crime, according to a report by a UC task force.

The report recommends several changes that UC President Richard Atkinson wants to implement to make certain the campuses are complying with federal law.

Colleges and universities must keep and classify all campus crime statistics and make that data available to students, staff and faculty, something the UC system wasn’t doing effectively, the report says.

The UC report includes an independent audit by George Washington University Police Chief Dolores Stafford, a nationally recognized expert on campus crime reporting.

Her review concludes the Irvine and Riverside campuses “were seriously out of compliance.”

Stafford reported that crimes from branch campus locations and off-campus buildings were not included in annual crime reports at UC Irvine.

She also found that in several instances burglaries were wrongly categorized as thefts and that crime statistics from residence halls were reported separately from on-campus statistics even though they should be reported as an aggregate number.

“It is obvious that there was no intent to ‘hide crime’ since some of the errors included instances where crimes were over-reported,” Stafford writes in the report. “However, it is imperative that the campus make an effort to accurately report the crime statistics.”