Harvard Tops Ivy League In Burglary

Campus crime statistics released for 2004 show that Harvard has the highest burglary rate amongst Ivy League and a number of other top universities.

Harvard is reported to have had 446 on-campus burglaries last year, while its nearest Ivy rival was Yale with 82. The lowest rate was Columbia, which reported just 16 burglaries.

According to Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) Spokesman Steven G. Catalano, Harvard’s burglary rate is inflated compared to other colleges’ because of the way the HUPD categorizes crime. Universities are obligated to report annual campus crime under the 1990 Clery Act, which only requires universities to include certain types of crime.

While burglaries must be included under the Clery Act, larcenies are not. According to Catalano, a burglary is a theft that involves trespassing—someone unlawfully entering university property, while larcenies are thefts that occur in public spaces where anyone is authorized to go.

Although it is not required, Harvard includes the larceny rate in its Clery report.

Where there is ambiguity over how to categorize a crime, Catalano said “one could see the motivation to classify more crimes as larcenies than burglaries”—because such crimes would not show up in the Clery report.

The figures seems to bear this out: Harvard’s number of larcenies is 229, far lower than its number of burglaries, whereas most other colleges report more larcenies than burglaries.

Northeastern University, for example, reports just 5 burglaries, but 345 larcenies.

“We have always been and will continue to be transparent about crime on campus,” Catalano said.

Larcenies must only be reported in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report, which is not published on most university websites.

James Farrier, associate director of Northeastern Public Safety Division, said that a crime is only classified as a burglary only if there is very clear evidence that someone trespassed on university property. Anything that is stolen in a “public space,” such as a library, would be called a larceny.

HUPD, by contrast, does not classify university libraries as public space. This means that with very few exceptions, anything stolen anywhere on campus is recorded as a burglary, Catalano said.

A brief survey of several top universities suggests that Harvard’s way of reporting theft is relatively rare. Other university police said they would only consider theft a burglary if it occurred in a student residence hall.

Columbia’s Assistant Vice President for Public Safety James F. McShane said that the Department of Education had not helped universities to interpret the Clery Act until this past June.

The department’s new handbook attempts to “assist...in a step-by-step and readable manner, in meeting the regulatory requirements of the Clery Act,” according to the handbook’s introduction.

McShane said that before the guidelines’ release—which will affect next year’s statistics, but not those of 2004— Columbia’s safety department spent “a lot of time worrying about the distinctions between burglary and larceny” as well as many other crimes.

Catalano said that the Clery Act could help to give a fuller picture of campus crime by including larcenies.

“If the goal of publishing crime statistics is to allow students, faculty, staff, and parents who are looking to make informed decision about the safety of that campus, not having the larcenies is defeating that purpose,” Catalano said.

Others disagree, arguing that the Clery reports are a sufficient barometer of crime, adding that there is a correlation between Clery-reported burglaries and general crime levels.

Even if larcenies and burglaries are added together, Harvard still reports a high level of crime among top universities—675 combined burglaries and larcenies as compared to MIT’s 444.