Introduction

Schools and colleges are valued institutions that help build upon the nation’s foundations and serve as an arena where the growth and stability of future generations begin. Crime in schools and colleges is therefore one of the most troublesome social problems in the Nation today. Not only does it affect those involved in the criminal incident, but it also hinders societal growth and stability. In that light, it is vital to understand the characteristics surrounding crime in schools, colleges, and universities and the offenders who reportedly commit these offenses so that law enforcement, policy makers, school administrators, and the public can properly combat and reduce the amount of crime occurring at these institutions.

Tremendous resources have been used to develop a myriad of federal and nonfederal studies that focus on identifying the characteristics surrounding violent crime, property crime, and/or crimes against society in schools. The objective of such studies is to identify and measure the crime problem facing the Nation’s more than 90,000 schools and the nearly 50 million students in attendance. 1 The findings of these studies have generated significant debates surrounding the actual levels of violent and nonviolent crimes and the need for preventative policies. Some research indicates there has been an increase in school violence activities, such as a study from the School Violence Resource Center which showed that the percentage of high school students who were threatened or injured with a weapon increased from 1993 to 2001. 2 Other research notes decreases in student victimization rates for both violent and nonviolent crimes during a similar time period (1992–2002). 3 Moreover, the circumstances surrounding crime in schools, colleges, and universities are not always the ones that gain wide notoriety. The most significant problems in schools are not necessarily issues popularly considered important as most conflicts are related to everyday school interactions. 4 Furthermore, the National Center for Education Statistics notes that “it is difficult to gauge the scope of crime and violence in schools without collecting data, given the large amount of attention devoted to isolated incidents of extreme school violence.” 5 These conflicting conclusions concerning the ability to measure the overall situation of crime in school, college, and university environments make it difficult for policy makers to assess the effectiveness of policies and their impact on this phenomenon.

The Nation’s need to understand crime as it occurs at schools, colleges, and universities was officially placed into law by the US Congress with the passage of the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act 6 (Clery Act). Prompted by the 1986 rape and murder of a 19-year-old Lehigh College student in her dorm room, the Clery Act requires universities and colleges to report crime statistics, based on Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) definitions, to the Department of Education (ED) and to disclose crime statistics to nearly 16 million students attending any one of the Nation’s approximately 4,200 degree-granting post-secondary institutions. 7 The Clery Act, most recently amended in 2000, demands stiff financial penalties from post-secondary institutions found to misreport crime statistics to the ED. Such penalties are currently set at $27,500 per incident. 8 Though the Clery Act requires colleges and universities to report their crime data to the ED, neither it nor any other Federal legislation requires these institutions to report the data to the UCR Program.

Situations surrounding crime at school locations vary based on the offender’s motive and the intended victim. For example, incidents involving student offenders and student victims constitute the stereotypical definition of crime at schools, colleges, and universities where the offender and victim are present to participate in the activities occurring at the institution. However, there are situations involving adult and/or juvenile offenders and victims, where the school serves only as an offense location because neither the offender nor the victim is present to participate in school functions. Criminal acts due to political motivation, hate crimes, and crimes perpetrated by offenders against victims who are not instructors or students and have no other relation to the school are examples of such situations.

In an attempt to shed light on crime in schools, colleges, and universities, this study used incident-based crime data the FBI received from a limited set of law enforcement agencies through the UCR Program. Some of the findings are perhaps contrary to popular perceptions; for example, over the 5-year study period, the use of knives/cutting instruments was over three times more prevalent than the use of a gun. (Based on Table 8.) Other findings reflect conventional wisdom; for example, males were nearly 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for crime in schools and colleges than females. (Based on Table 12.)

Objective

Data

The data used for this study reside in databases maintained by the UCR Program, which the FBI manages according to a June 11, 1930, congressional mandate. Law enforcement agencies nationwide may choose to participate in the UCR Program by voluntarily submitting crime data in one of two formats: the Summary Reporting System or the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Not all UCR data, however, reflect sufficient detail to be useful for this study. Therefore, only the UCR data gathered via the NIBRS were used.

Methodology

Table 1: UCR Participation via the NIBRS, by Year

1 Based on law enforcement agencies that submitted their UCR data to the FBI in accordance with NIBRS reporting requirements for inclusion in the annual NIBRS database.

Note: See the study text for specific data definitions, uses, and limitations.

Using a combination of six possible data segments (administrative, offense, victim, property, offender, and arrestee), the NIBRS captures information on criminal incidents involving any of 22 offense categories made up of 46 specific crimes. To date, the NIBRS offers 56 data elements, i.e., data fields, that law enforcement may use to capture descriptive data about the victims, offenders, and circumstances of criminal incidents and arrests. Examples of NIBRS data elements include UCR Offense Code,Type of Victim, and Age of Offender (see Appendix E for a complete list of data elements). 9 Furthermore, each of the 56 data elements is translated into a series of codes that specify the information being collected.

Of particular importance to the present study is the NIBRS data element Location Type, specifically Code 22,10 which identifies offenses occurring at schools and colleges. All the crime data used in the tables and discussions throughout this study were reported by law enforcement as occurring at NIBRS Location Type, Code 22, which hereafter is referred to as school(s), unless otherwise noted.

As illustrated in Figure 1, an incident report contains various types of data collection segments in addition to the administrative segment. The report may also include multiple segment records within one or more segments if the incident should warrant them. For example, an incident occurred during which three victims were held up on school property by two offenders using guns. The offenders shot and killed the victims and were subsequently arrested. This incident will have one administrative record, two offense records, various property records for the stolen or recovered property, three victim records, two offender records, and two arrestee records separated into the appropriate segments in the NIBRS database structure.

This study focuses primarily on the offender and arrestee data records; it looks at other records only as they pertain to offenders. Using the narrowly-defined set of data records, the study specifically addresses incident characteristics (Tables 2 and 7), offender characteristics (Tables 3-5), victim-to-offender relationships (Table 6), offense characteristics (Tables 8 and 9), and arrestee characteristics (Tables 10-15). Expanding Tables 2 and 8, Appendices A and B show the number of offenses by offense type by year and the weapon type by offense type, respectively.

Throughout this study, age groups are aggregated and cross tabulated to help readers view the traits of offenders and arrestees. These age groups are formulated based upon the following age divisions: Birth to 4 years old, 5 to 9 years old, 10 to 12 years old, 13 to 15 years old, 16 to 18 years old, and 19 years or older.

Additional considerations for this study follow:

• The term gun refers collectively to all firearm codes found in the NIBRS format, including: firearm, handgun, rifle, shotgun, and other firearm types.11 Furthermore, information for type weapon/force involved is only collected for Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter, Negligent Manslaughter, Justifiable Homicide,Kidnapping/Abduction, Forcible Rape, Forcible Sodomy, Sexual Assault with an Object, Forcible Fondling, Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Simple Assault,Extortion/Blackmail, and Weapon Law Violations.
• Victim-to-offender relationships are only collected for Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter, Negligent Manslaughter, Justifiable Homicide,Kidnapping/Abduction, Forcible Rape, Forcible Sodomy, Sexual Assault with an Object, Forcible Fondling, Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Simple Assault,Intimidation, Incest, and Statutory Rape.
• Offenders may be suspected of using alcohol, computers, and/or drugs in an offense. Because more than one of these codes can be collected on any given offense record, there may be multiple counts of use in incidents. Multiple counts can be generated in two ways. An incident with one offense record may be associated with the use of alcohol and drugs. Another incident may contain two offense records, one offense indicating the suspected use of alcohol and a second offense where the offender is suspected of using drugs. Both types of incidents will indicate that the offender was suspected of using both alcohol and drugs. Caution is needed when interpreting this information.
• Frequency tables and cross tabulations are used to examine the characteristics discussed for the 5-year study time frame. See the Limitations section on cautions for comparing frequencies from year to year.
• The data used in this study reflect the NIBRS submissions originally made for each year within the 5-year period. They do not include data that were subsequently reported via time-window submissions.12

Special Offense Definitions

An important distinction must be made in the context of this study concerning the use of the term offense. In the UCR Program, the term offense has a very particular definition that employs a series of rules defining the way offenses are counted. Specifically, the number of offenses for crimes against persons is determined by the number of victims, while the number of offenses for crimes against property and society is based on each distinct operation.

This study also introduces a nontraditional counting method that counts the number of records associated with the offense segment. Within any incident reported in NIBRS, there is only one record reported for each unique offense code. In NIBRS, there are 46 Group A offense codes in which full incident information is collected and 11 Group B offense codes where only arrestee information is reported. This study uses the number of offense records in Table 2 and Appendix B which shows weapon type by offense type. The effect of this counting method is that the number of victims is not considered when counting the number of offense records. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2, on the following page, illustrates how offenses and offense records are counted in NIBRS for a hypothetical incident with three victims of homicide who were also robbed. The left of the figure shows the counts of offenses which include three counts of homicide, Code 09A, and one of robbery, Code 120, for a total of four offenses. Because homicide is a crime against persons, one offense is tallied for each victim, while robbery, a crime against property, only counts one offense for each distinct operation, regardless of the number of victims. However, on the right of the figure where offense records are counted, only one count of homicide and one of robbery are used to determine the sum of offense records. Therefore, the number of offense records equals two, one for each unique offense type in this example.

Because this study focuses on offenders and arrestees, this approach is beneficial, particularly when examining weapon type by offense type (see Appendix B), since it eliminates the natural weighting that occurs when using traditional UCR offense counting rules based on the number of victims. For example, because the weapon type is associated with the offense segment in NIBRS, an incident involving three murder victims has three offenses connected to the weapon type, overestimating the presence of that weapon type. However, if the offense type is maintained as the unit of analysis for weapon type, the weighting of weapon types by the number of victims is avoided. Of greater relevance to the objective of this study are the types of offenses that offenders commit in schools. Certainly, studies involving NIBRS data that focus on the victim or offense segments require the examination of offenses based on the traditional UCR offense counting practices.