Though the accuracy of college crime data has been questioned, experts say Penn does a good job in reporting and distributing crime statistics.
"There are some schools, the University of Penn being one of them," said Jonathan Kassa, executive director of Security on Campus. "You can really tell those schools go out of their way to communicate to their students and their families about their policies."
SOC is a nonprofit organization dedicated to college-crime prevention. It ensures the enforcement of the Clery Act, a federal statute requiring colleges to publish statistics on crimes that occur on or around their campuses.
The two main components of the Clery Act are keeping accurate statistics and communicating security policies, according to Kassa.
A Jan. 30 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled "There's Little Safety in Numbers," criticized self-reported college-crime statistics because their accuracy cannot be guaranteed. It said these numbers are "neither reliable nor comparable."
The Web site of the U.S. Department of Education, which aggregates data for college crimes, posts a disclaimer saying the department "cannot vouch for the accuracy of the data reported here."
Division of Public Safety spokeswoman Stef Cella said statistics for crimes at Penn are accurate. "We at Penn happen to do crime mapping and compare crimes monthly and annually to previous years," she said. "We keep track of everything."
Penn has had its ups and downs with the Clery Act. In 1998, the Department of Education investigated the University for possible violations of the Act.
In 2003, however, SOC awarded Penn's DPS the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Award for its Closed Circuit Television camera network and for its campus and community patrols.
The Department of Education has started a campaign to verify college-reported statistics and has stepped up its enforcement of the Clery Act, wrote SOC Director of Public Policy S. Daniel Carter in an e-mail.
"Significant work has been done to make it more reliable," he said, "although admittedly it still isn't yet perfect."
Carter said college security forces should view Clery Act disclosures as "part of a campus-safety marketing campaign."
"The more they make the statistics and policy summaries accessible, both in terms of understandability and actual saturation on campus, the more effective they will be," Carter said.
According to a 2001 report by Virginia Tech, about 27 percent of college students were aware of the Act. Eight percent of prospective students were influenced by crime statistics in making their college decisions.
At Penn, every University employee receives a copy of the Campus Safety and Security Annual Report in the mail by Oct. 1, and every student receives a link to the online version.
Cella is in the process of updating the dense brochure to make it more reader-friendly.
And students say they have found the online crime statistics useful.
"It's helpful in telling people where crimes happen and where to avoid going," said College junior Brendan MacFadgen. "I'm usually careful at going out by myself."
