Light of Day Project

Campus Liquor Violations Spiked in 2010

Yanely — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:02:11 +0000

By George Storm and Kaley Heflin, Texan News Service

Feb. 1, 2012

The Tarleton State University’s annual security report on crime statistics from 2010 shows a significant increase in liquor law violations.

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, or Clery Act, requires all colleges and universities that participate in federal financial aid programs to keep and disclose all crime information that occur on or around their campus.

Tarleton State University’s 2010 report, issued last semester, outlines all emergency protocols, police guidelines, university sanctions and statistics.

The most notable statistic on the report shows that the amount of on-campus liquor law violations referred for disciplinary action has increased from 31 in 2008 to 53 in 2010. Police Chief Justin Williams said he believes this is a result of campus officers building a better rapport with students, faculty, and residence hall staff. Officers referred students for disciplinary action if it was their first offense.

Williams hosted a development course for all residence hall staff and residence assistants. The program centered on a better understanding of common criminal activities that occur in the residence halls, and ways to prevent them. This has led to the increase in liquor law violations, all of which were reported from the residence halls in 2010.

Williams said when he came to Tarleton, officers were more patrol oriented, keeping an eye on the campus by way of their police cruisers. He changed the department’s methods by stressing “communication and building relationships around the campus.”

On-campus burglaries are down from 32 in 2008 to seven in 2010. According to Williams, the dramatic difference is the result of a serial burglar who targeted the residence halls during the holiday break of December 2008. All but one of the burglaries of 2010 occurred in the residence halls.

There were two forcible sexual assaults on campus in 2010 and one aggravated assault. This is an increase from previous years’ totals, one sexual assault and no aggravated assault in 2008 and 2009.

Higher visibility of officers around the campus and their receptiveness to students’ questions or comments is making an impact on some students.

Tarleton State junior Nick Prikasky said, “I think it’s cool that you can just walk up to a cop and talk to them. It makes you feel safe.”

Crime stats for 2011 won’t be available until after the year ends. But a check of daily crime logs for the first months of the year shows crime is continuing to drop.

Tarleton’s bugaries dropped from 10 to 9 and sex offenses from 3 to 0. No homicides, robberies, aggravated assaults, or arson cases were reported.Liquor law and drug violations are also down from 59 to 24 and 9 to 6, respectively.

For more information contact Texan News Service at texannews@tarleton.edu.

Student Journalist Create Local Crime Maps

Yanely — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:15:56 +0000

Tarleton State University

 
Tuesday, January 31, 2012

STEPHENVILLE, Texas—Information about campus and city crimes is just a click away with the publication of two maps created by student journalists from the Department of Communication Studies.

The maps are part of the Light of Day Project sponsored by the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.

The project aims to help students learn how to access government records. Amber Ward and Monica Pierce, editors for Texan News Service, filed requests under the Texas Public Information Act with Tarleton and the Stephenville police departments for crime reports from 2009-2010.

Students in media writing courses helped catalog each police report into databases that are now interactive maps on the Texan News Service website (http://www.tarleton.edu/texannews). About 60 students helped with the project.

“Sinking their teeth into this kind of real journalism teaches students about the role journalists play in our communities,” Texan News Service adviser Dan Malone said. “A lot of reporting is filing requests and culling through tons of data to make sense of it for the public. These student journalists are shining the light of day on crimes on and around campus as a public service.”

The online crime map shows reported crimes on the Tarleton campus between 2009-2010 and Stephenville for 2010. Each dot on the maps represents the location of a crime reported to police. Clicking on the dots provides details about the crime.

“I feel like we are providing a wonderful community service with having Tarleton and Stephenville crimes mapped in an easy-to-use format,” said editor in chief Ward. “People have the right to know what is happening on their campus and in their neighborhood. I’m very proud of our work and I hope that we can continue to provide for the Tarleton and Stephenville community.”

For managing editor Pierce, “The Light of Day Project has been a time-consuming project but I am very excited for the end results.” She said she hopes the data will help people in Stephenville, whether they are looking for real estate or just want to be more aware of their surroundings.

Six other universities participated in the project, including Abilene Christian University, Southern Methodist University, Texas Christian University, Texas Tech, and the University of Texas at Arlington.

VIDEO: Search crime on campus and in your neighborhood

Yanely — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:55:13 +0000

SMU Light of Day Project from SMU-TV on Vimeo.

The Light of Day Project, completed by SMU journalism students, includes interactive maps of crimes reported on campus and around the area. Students can browse crimes reported in their own neighborhoods, ranging from minor to serious offenses.
Our Clery Act Scorecard tracks how well SMU keeps track of these crimes and offenses and how well the university informs the campus community about public safety.
To access the SMU light of day project, go to http://bit.ly/smulod
Be sure to check the print edition of The Daily Campus and back to the website Friday for a full version of the project.
All data was gathered by the Fall 2011 SMU Technology Reporting class: Shelby Foster, Michael Murphy, Brad Namdar, Chandler Schlegel, Meghan Sikkel, Alexandra Sisto and Essete Workneh. The data visualization coordinator was journalism student Brooks Powell.

Battle for open records

Yanely — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:54:38 +0000

By Ioanna Makris and Henry M. Ramos
For The Daily Toreador Daily Toreador – Dept. of Student Media, Texas Tech University | 0 comments

A request under the Texas Public Information Act to the Lubbock Police Department for offense reports naming Texas Tech students as victims of off-campus crimes did not result in the disclosure of the names of victims.

The LPD released a spreadsheet of some 16,000 reported crimes, along with the type of crime, the date, location of the crime and a brief description of what occurred. However, the LPD refused to put the names of the victims in the spreadsheet even though they are contained on the front pages of offense reports, which are public records.

The information requested was all crime reports from 2009 for the types of crimes listed in the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, or Clery Act. The 2010 report will not be available until October 2011.

However, the spreadsheet of more than 16,000 offense reports with the names and dates of birth of victims was eventually released by the LPD after Matt Stiles, a reporter with The Texas Tribune, filed a separate, but identical, Texas Public Information Act request with the LPD.

Tech was asked to release records under the Texas Public Information Act pertaining to student names from the school years of 2008-2009 and 2009-2010.

However, the received information had approximately 7,000 student names for both years, compared to the approximate total of 30,000 students.

When Tech officials were asked to explain why they were unable to furnish all of the information requested, the response was that it would be a violation of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act to disclose the names of students who had “opted out” of having their names and other personal information listed in the university directory. However, Ronny Wall, associate general counsel at Tech, said if the information was requested for educational and research purposes, the university might be able to furnish it.

After contacting the Institutional Research department at Tech and explaining that the information requested under the Texas Public Information Act was for educational purposes and for the betterment of the university, all of the student names were released, as well as their dates of birth. Names of individual students in the project have only been used with their permission, and the names of all other student crime victims have been kept confidential.

A cross-match was then conducted of the crime information received from the LPD with the student information received from Tech, which resulted in a match of some 1,600 students listed as victims of off-campus crimes.

Rape experience scars student

Yanely — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:48:42 +0000

By Ioanna Makris and Henry Ramos

On Sept. 17, 2010, a Texas Tech student’s life was forever changed at The Centre, a popular off-campus apartment complex.

“He got on top of me and he started kissing me and holding me down,” she said. “He was holding my arms down and he started moving down to my neck, kissing and sucking on my neck and biting me.”

Taylor, who asked that a different name be used to protect her privacy, tried fighting back while telling Jess, her attacker, to stop.

“He was very aggressive and very violent with me. At times he grabbed my throat — right around my neck — and was gripping it,” Taylor said. “I kept saying, ‘Please let me leave. I don’t want to be here.’”Jess would not let Taylor leave. She said he kept forcing himself upon her and would not stop.

“When he moved his hands from holding my arms down and moved them to my neck, I tried pushing back at him,” she said. “At this point I was screaming, ‘No, no, let me leave.’ I tried fighting back and doing the best I could, but he would not give up.”

Taylor kept fighting back, but was not able to keep Jess from holding her down.

“He raped me,” she said.

Taylor said the incident lasted about 15 minutes, but it felt like hours. Once Jess released Taylor, she said she got up, ran out of the apartment and kept running.

“He came out and was yelling at me, but I did not look back,” she said. “I just ran down the stairs, got to my car and left. He called me 52 times that night asking me to come back, which proves how messed up he was that night.”

Feeling numb and unsure of what to do, Taylor said she went home and was in a daze. She said she eventually fell asleep, and when she woke up in the morning and looked in the mirror, she could not believe what she saw.

“When I looked in the mirror in the morning, I had bruises all around my neck,” Taylor said. “I was shocked to see there were physical marks on my body. I remember thinking I had to stay in my room all day. I did not know how I was going to cover it up.”

Approximately a month later, Taylor went to the Lubbock Police Department to file a restraining order and shared her story with two Lubbock police officers.

Taylor decided to press charges, but they were dropped for a lack of evidence.

According to the 2009 Texas Tech Clery Report, which includes all Tech campuses, there were two forcible sex offenses on campus. In 2009, according to the Lubbock Rape Crisis Center, 105 victims of rape were reported to be between the ages of 18 and 25. Only 26 of those reporting being raped said they were college students. The locations of the rapes were not disclosed.

Tech Chief of Police Ron Seacrist said not all sexual offenses are reported because many victims do not want police involvement, which results in an inaccurate number reported for sexual offenses on and off campus.

The Lubbock Police Department does occasionally notify university police out of courtesy if a student has been a victim of a crime off campus, Seacrist said. However, city police are not required by law to notify university police of crimes involving students.

A research report on the sexual victimization of college women conducted by the Department of Justice reports that women are 66.3 percent more likely to be a victim of completed rape off campus, while only 33.7 percent of women will be a victim of completed rape on campus.

—Editor’s note: It is The Daily Toreador’s policy not to publish the names of sexual assault victims without their permission.

Off-campus crime data reveals hole in US law

admin — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:36:33 +0000

Click Map for link

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

By Ioanna Makris and Henry Ramos

Some 1,600 Texas Tech students were victims of crimes off campus in Lubbock in 2009, compared to just 35 on campus.

The 1,600 crimes, which were about 10 percent of all the major crimes reported in Lubbock that year, were not included in Tech’s federally-mandated crime disclosure report, which only requires on-campus crimes be reported. Numbers from 2010 will not be available until Oct. 1.

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, or Clery Act, requires all universities receiving federal aid (basically every university in the country) to report crimes on campus in order to notify and alert students, prospective students, parents, faculty and staff of the prevalence of crime at the universities.

However, a major shortcoming of the law is it does not require disclosure of crimes against students off campus, which, in the case of many universities like Tech, is where most students live.

“It is such a problem with off-campus crime and there are so many of them,” said Connie Clery, one of the primary forces behind the act and mother of Jeanne Clery. “But when we started it, it was so impossible for us to deal with everything. It was easier to deal with on-campus (crime).”

Connie Clery said she needed to do something to protect college students after her 19-year-old freshman daughter was raped and murdered in her residence hall at Lehigh University in 1986.

“There is nothing worse than losing a child,” she said while crying. “There is just nothing worse than having your child butchered and murdered unnecessarily in a place where you think it’s safe. There is nothing worse.”

Connie Clery said she hopes to see a change in the way off-campus crime is treated one day.

“I don’t know how, but we have to deal with off-campus crime because that is where the students are, and we have to take care of them,” she said.

Tech currently has more than 30,000 students enrolled in the university, according to the dean of student’s website. However, approximately 23,000, or 77 percent, live off campus. According to the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Educational Statistics, between the school years of 2007 and 2008, about 88 percent of undergraduate students lived off campus in Texas, whereas nationally, 83 percent of undergraduate students lived off campus.

Connie Clery said she knows it is also the obligation of students to stay informed about off-campus crimes.

“Students now have to be responsible too,” she said. “I feel the greatest responsibility is that students have to keep themselves informed so they can take precautions.”

Tech’s student body makes up about 13 percent of the population in Lubbock, compared to the 10 percent student victimization rate.

The great majority of the crimes committed against Tech students off campus in 2009 were not crimes of personal violence. There were 698 burglaries of an automobile, 502 burglaries of a residence and 255 thefts. There were no homicides reported. Fifty-one aggravated assaults were reported off campus, compared to three on campus, and 24 robberies were listed off campus, compared to three on campus.

Sexual assaults and rapes are difficult to determine because many go unreported. For most that are reported, the Lubbock police do not provide the name of the victim on the public crime report.

According to the Lubbock Rape Crisis Center, 105 victims were raped between the ages of 18 and 25 in 2009, with 26 of those reporting they were college students. Tech reported two sexual assaults on campus in 2009.

This project was done as a part of the Light of Day Project by the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, in conjunction with The Texas Tribune, to try to determine if there is a serious problem with the Clery Act not requiring the reporting of off-campus crime against students. A number of other universities in Texas also participated in this project.

The other universities that agreed to participate were Abilene Christian University, Southern Methodist University, Tarleton State University, Texas Christian University, Texas State University, the University of Texas at Arlington, and the University of Texas at Austin.

To date, most of the universities were unsuccessful in determining the amount of off-campus crimes because of legal hurdles.

The University of Texas at Austin later decided to withdraw from the project.

In early May, Wanda Garner Cash, University of Texas at Austin clinical professor and associate director of journalism, said the school decided not to participate because of the lack of student interest.

However, in an Aug. 5 Freedom of Information Foundation meeting in Austin, Cash said the reason why the university did not participate was a lack of faculty interest.

In order to compile the research, a list of all the crimes in Lubbock with the names and dates of birth of victims was obtained. A separate list of all Tech students by name and date of birth was also obtained. The two lists were compared in a database program by first name, last name and date of birth. More than 1,600 matches resulted. It is possible that a few of these are not Tech students but Lubbock residents who have the same first name, last name and date of birth as a Tech student.

In an attempt to gather an accurate analysis, thefts and shoplifting at retail locations (for example, Walmart, the South Plains Mall and a few Lubbock gas stations) with the same complaining victim were removed from the data. These crimes were removed because the student who reported the crime acted as a representative of the store and was not personally victimized. However, since the data obtained from the Texas Public Information Act request was not detailed enough to make a completely accurate determination for all thefts, some of these crimes might still be in the analysis.

An example of a crime committed against a Tech student not listed on the Clery Act report is a recent assault that occurred more than a mile east of the Tech campus in a popular student apartment complex.

Rachel Hutchinson, who at the time lived at University Pointe, said she unlocked the front door while waiting for her friend to come study in her apartment. After sitting back down at the kitchen table, the front door flew open and standing in front of her was a naked man.

“I was petrified. I thought something bad was going to happen to me,” Hutchinson said. “I thought I was going to get raped.”

With only a sock on his foot, the intruder began running towards her, Hutchinson said. She ran to her roommate’s bedroom door and started pounding it hysterically while screaming for help. The intruder was swinging at her, but Hutchinson managed to dodge the punches.

“He was facing me at her door and he punched at me, but I somehow ducked,” she said. “I don’t know how I ducked.”

According to Hutchinson’s offense report, the suspected attacker, Jarrod Lemuel Dorsey, resides more than 300 miles away from Lubbock. Hutchinson’s roommate said Dorsey was visiting friends who also lived at University Pointe.

University Pointe, which is a part of American Campus Communities, declined to comment on the incident that occurred on March 25.

According to data compiled, University Pointe and Lynnwood Townhomes had some of the highest rates of student victimization in 2009.

Gary Hutchinson, Rachel Hutchinson’s father, said he called University Pointe multiple times before he was able to speak with an on-site manager.

“I asked about the security in their complex. All they said they had was security gates and an officer who lives on site,” Gary Hutchinson said. “It is not as secure as you think it is.”

He said he asked the manager to share his daughter’s story with the other students residing in the complex, but when a statement was released, it was very generic and only reminded students to lock their doors at night.

Gary Hutchinson said it would be beneficial if a report or a map was created each year showing which apartment complexes off campus have the most crime.

“Something like that would have factored into our decision of where Rachel should live,” Gary Hutchinson said.

Tyler Patton, Tech Student Government Association president, is also concerned about off-campus safety.

“A relatively high concentration of crime occurs right across the street, whether in Overton Park or Tech Terrace. That is where a majority of our upperclassmen, off-campus students live,” Patton said.

He said the City of Lubbock and officials at Tech should be attempting to find a solution for off-campus crime reporting.

“That really means to me we should be coordinating better,” Patton said.

Randy Neugebauer, who represents the 19th District in the United States House of Representatives, said the use of technology is another vital tool in notifying students about crimes that have occurred.

“I have already seen a lot of schools that have adopted procedures where they can notify students by a text message or phone call,” he said. “In the technology age we live in today, we can use that technology to notify students and it would be beneficial.”

Neugebauer said collaboration is also a key component in keeping Tech students safe off campus.

“I know the Tech campus has their own police department and the city of Lubbock has their own police department. You would hope the collaboration is going on and where you’re identifying areas that are high crime areas,” Neugebauer said. “Taking appropriate steps to make sure you have presence there to work in those areas.”

Ron Seacrist, Tech chief of police, said the relationship with the Lubbock Police Department is good but LPD does not always notify Tech police if a student has been victimized off campus.

“Sometimes we get notified. Sometimes we don’t,” he said. “It depends upon how busy they are, and quite honestly who the shift commander is at that time.”

Seacrist said there is no law requiring city police to notify university police of student victimization off campus.

—Editor’s note: These stories were completed as part of the Light of Day Project in conjunction with The Texas Tribune, and were submitted for publication to The Daily Toreador.