Reports of motor vehicle thefts increased over the past year, while reports of burglaries decreased, according to the College’s Security and Fire Safety Report. The report, released by Safety and Security on Sept. 30, contains data from the past three years about student-reported crimes.
The Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act requires all colleges and universities that receive federal funding to adhere to a number of safety-related protocols, including publishing an annual safety report. The report enables people to compare safety statistics “from one institution to another,” according to Clery compliance officer Grace Alden.
“In theory, because everything is collected in the same way at each institution, you can make an apples-to-apples comparison when you’re choosing which institution you want to go to,” Alden said.
Director of Safety and Security Keiselim Montas said the report creates “an opportunity for the community to see the services that Safety and Security provide[s].”
Reports of fondling increased from 9 in 2023 to 21 in 2024, and cases of domestic violence increased from 5 in 2023 to 17 in 2024.
Alden said it was “entirely possible” that the increase was because “people are more willing to report.” She added that two specific incidents of sexual violence likely “inflated” the number of reports, noting that some incidents can have an “outsized impact” on the data.
“Sometimes one incident that involves a lot of offenses can have an outsized impact,” Alden said. “We count those crimes when they are reported, and we suddenly learned of 16 sexual assaults, all stemming from one course of conduct in one single relationship.”
Alden said it can be difficult to distinguish between the number of reports and the number of actual incidents that have happened.
“One of the problems with collecting statistics like these — that maybe Congress didn’t quite envision — is that it sounds very simple to say, ‘Count the crimes and report them,’ but how do you know when the crimes have happened?” Alden said.
Motor vehicle thefts rose significantly compared to previous years: There were 18 reported incidents in 2022, 25 in 2023 and 33 in 2024. Alden said the growing use of “small electronic devices” such as electrical scooters and e-bikes might explain the increase.
“They’re highly portable and they’re often stolen,” she said.
Mason Smith ’29, who owns an electric scooter, said that he “locks [his] scooter up everywhere”
“There was a guy who had a scooter taken and he found it outside, and the battery was completely killed,” Smith said. “I’m always gonna be locking that thing up.”
Reports of liquor law violations increased from 106 violations in 2023 to 181 violations in 2024. Alden said this increase can be attributed to an “outlier” incident involving several violations.
“There was one incident where 60 people were found to have violated any of the liquor laws that apply,” Alden said. “If we remove that one event as an outlier and we look, we’ve got an increase of 105 to 121.”
Montas said Safety and Security depends on campus community members to inform them “when things are happening.”
“We need to be each other’s keeper and we need to work as a team,” Montas said. “Safety and Security cannot be everywhere.”
Alden encouraged students to “take your reasonable precautions going through life.”
“Robert Frost said that good fences make good neighbors in one of his most famous poems,” Alden said. “Lock your doors. Lock the bikes up.”
