The release of Cal Poly’s annual Clery report displayed an overall decrease in crime rates for 2018. A comparison between Cal Poly, UCSB, UC Davis and Fresno State highlight UCSB with the highest rates of offenses out of the four similar universities.
In the wake of the 2017 #MeToo movement, sex offenses in 2018 saw a slow decline in all colleges except UC Davis, where numbers continue to gradually climb. Despite the general decrease, stalking reports at UCSB jumped exponentially. Alcohol violations for 2018 meanwhile dipped for each university.
2018 Clery data shows that, in comparison to UCSB, UC Davis and Fresno, Cal Poly’s rate for reported sexual crimes falls in the middle of the road, with numbers steadily dropping from 2016 onward.
“In general, Cal Poly enjoys a relatively safe and secure campus community with a low number of occurrences of violent crime each year,” university spokesperson Matt Lazier wrote in an email to Mustang News. “Because of this, changes from year to year in the number of reports of a specific type of crime can appear significant in terms of percentage, even though they are small numerically.”
Among the universities, UCSB had the highest rates of all three sex offenses — fondling, rape and stalking — in the past year.
There was an “increase in reports of stalking due to ongoing campus education about recognizing and reporting interpersonal violence,” according to the document containing UCSB’s crime data.
In the past decade, UCSB has had the highest number of liquor violations out of the four compared universities, but the number has steadily declined in that same time.
Cal Poly’s rates for liquor law violations sat at the bottom from 2000 until around 2013. The numbers nearly doubled by 2016, though since that jump, numbers have gradually decreased.
The annual Clery report gets sent to members of college communities in compliance with the Clery Act, a protection law put in place to promote transparency with campus crime policy and statistics. The Clery family lobbied for transformative change in policy after their daughter, Jeanne Clery, was raped and murdered in her college dorm at 19 in 1986.
More information on the Clery Act can be found at the Clery Center website.