Crime rates at Brown and in Providence dropped in 2006 from 2005, according to a recent FBI report. But Mark Porter, Brown's chief of police and director of public safety, said he believes the report could be misleading because local agencies sometimes define and classify crimes differently than the FBI.
The University and the city annually submit their crime statistics to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program, which gathers data from about 17,000 law enforcement agencies around the country, said bureau spokesman Steve Fischer. Agencies voluntarily submit crime data to the FBI program.
Violent crimes in Providence dropped from 1,207 in 2005 to 972 in 2006. These crimes, as defined by the FBI's report, comprise murder, forcible rape, robbery or aggravated assault. The city's property crimes - which include burglaries, thefts and arson - fell from 9,124 to 8,585 in the same period.
The University's crime trends matched the city's - property crimes dropped from 230 in 2005 to 178 in 2006, according to the Sept. 24 report.
Brown's three violent crimes in 2006 - versus two in 2005 - were the lowest among the Ivy League schools who reported to the FBI. Yale, Cornell and Harvard universities - with larger student bodies than Brown's - each had more violent crimes: Six at Yale, four at Cornell and 11 at Harvard. The University of Rhode Island, the only other Ocean State university to report, had six violent crimes on its Kingston campus.
Brown's Department of Public Safety, like the law enforcement agencies at many universities and in most U.S. cities, reports all criminal offenses that occur on or around campus.
Because the information is presented to the FBI on a voluntary basis, there is no guarantee it is complete. Unlike Brown, many universities don't send any information. Porter said DPS reports all on-campus crime to the FBI and that he is confident the department is doing all it can to provide valuable information to the FBI.
We send data to the FBI "because we take dealing with crime issues very seriously. In order to do that we think it's important to understand the information and understand the data that we have, and certainly share that data."
When Brown students are involved in off-campus crimes, DPS is alerted, but the Providence Police Department files the FBI report, Porter said. If a Brown student is mugged in downtown Providence, the crime will show up in the Providence crime database on the FBI Web site, and not in the Brown University crimes database. It is difficult, therefore, to determine how many Brown students have been involved in crimes in Providence.
Porter said he is confident that DPS nevertheless has a good idea of how many Brown students are involved in crime around the city.
"Whenever a student or a member of this community is involved in a crime, I think that they are more prone to contacting the Department of Public Safety," Porter said. "If they call us and ... they say 'I was down at the mall and this incident happened to me,' we'll call the PPD and send down a cruiser."
The FBI and DPS classify some crimes differently. For example, the FBI's database provides data for forcible rape but not for other sexual assaults, while the federal Department of Education requires universities to report other kinds of sex offenses, Porter said.
Universities are required to report crime statistics in accordance with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, named after a young woman who was raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dorm room in 1986.
"Sex offenses (that DPS reports) could also include rape and also include other things," Porter said, adding that the FBI's data could be confusing. In 2005, DPS reported four sexual assaults to the Department of Education, and one rape to the FBI.
