Campus Safety and Security

Data Overview

Campus Safety and Security data is provided by the Department of Education. The data allows students and families to investigate school safety; additionally, lawmakers and other institutions use the data to shape policy decisions.

Methodology and content

The data is collected from all Title IV funded schools which have a physical campus. Schools are instructed to report data for each of their branches with physical locations separately. Data collection is mandatory and each institution has varying requirements based on their size and land holdings.

Schools report a range of non-violent and violent offenses, including arrests, criminal offenses, and disciplinary actions on campus, off campus, in residence halls, and on public property. There is reporting for broad offenses such as robbery and drug possession; however, there is also reporting for more pressing offenses such as arson, violence against women, and hate crimes.

Finding the data

The Campus Safety site provides a user-friendly interface at which you can see full details for any school of interest. We accessed the full database of reporting at the Campus Safety and Security download page. We accessed the 2019 data on April 16, 2020.

How Ididio creates the safety data you see

The Grand Total

Although the source data for our Campus Safety numbers reports across multiple branches for some schools, the numbers are a bit inconsistent in the reporting:

• The number of students reported on each campus branch is evidently often the grand total number of students rather than the number at the individual branch.
• Some schools report no incidents on all branches excluding the main campus, and we would guess that in some cases all incidents have been combined across branches and reported once as occurring on the main campus.

For this reason, we report the number of offense incidents as a single total summed across all branches. The percentages that we report are created by calculating percentages at the branch level using the grand total number of reported students, and summing across all branches.

Wonky Data

There are a few cases for which we at Ididio see some alarming data whose values are verified from the source data that we suspect do not reflect reality. In some cases, we saw duplicate offense data across institutions with loose or unstated affiliations, while the total number of students were reported accurately for each uncombined individual institution. We believe in these unusual cases there may be unreasonably high percentages of offenses reported. We have chosen to share the data as reported on this site; however, we encourage those who are concerned by high numbers to speak to the impacted institutions to seek out alternative crime statistics.