Rise in number of reported rape, drug and alcohol law violations attributed to more awareness

The increase in the number of rape cases as well as liquor and drug law violations reported on the Syracuse University campus in 2015 is attributed to more awareness of the issues, university officials said.

SU’s annual security report, published by the Department of Public Safety on Friday, indicated the number of rape cases reported on campus rose to eight in 2015 from three in 2014. Six cases were reported in residential facilities, two in non-campus buildings or property and one on public property near campus.

The number of reported cases of stalking also climbed from one in 2014 to 10 in 2015.

Colleges and universities in the United States that receive federal money, including SU, are obligated to publish a security report by Oct. 1 every year under the Jeanne Clery Act. The government mandate requires three years of statistics and other security information to be included in the report.

Nikki Cooter, regulatory compliance at the Division of Campus Safety and Emergency Services who compiled the report, said she was not surprised to see more cases of sexual assault and relationship violence reported.

“There has been a lot of conversation and a lot of focus about sexual assault and relationship violence, a lot of court cases,” she said. “… People are talking about it more.”

Bobby Maldonado, DPS chief, said the reported cases have gone up not necessarily because of more sexual assault incidents on campus. But rather, he said, more people are reporting incidents as they are encouraged to do so through campaigns such as nationwide It’s On Us and New York state’s Enough is Enough.

Rebecca Reed Kantrowitz, senior vice president and dean of student affairs, said in an email that multiple awareness campaigns on campus, printed materials listing sources available for help and news coverages about these issues have helped students to “destigmatize and generate conversation” about the issues and provide options about how to report.

In 2015, United States Vice President Joe Biden visited SU  to bring attention to the issue of sexual and relationship violence on college campuses as part of the It’s On Us campaign.

SU, however, is currently under federal investigation by the U.S. Department of Education for its handling of a sexual assault case. The investigation was launched after a student filed a Title IX complaint, but SU did not inform the Chancellor’s Task Force on Sexual and Relationship Violence of the investigation.

As for drug and liquor law violations, the number of referrals and disciplinary actions have gone up by double digits. There was an almost 43 percent upswing for drug violations — from 87 in 2014 to 124 cases in 2015 — and about a 13 percent jump for liquor during the same period, from 900 to 1,020 cases. The increases come as SU saw about a 67 percent decrease in disciplinary referrals for drug law violations and about 28 percent in liquor law violations between 2013 and 2014.

The number of arrests related to drug law violations on campus, meanwhile, went down in 2015 from nine to 13 in the previous year.

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Kantrowitz said drug and liquor law violations consequences have remained consistent throughout the last few years. As far the surge in the number of reported cases, Tony Callisto, senior vice president and chief law enforcement officer, said more DPS officers are notified of violations through people such as resident advisers.

Cooter said the security report only includes incidents that happened in the aforementioned areas — on campus, residential facilities, non-campus building or property and public property near SU — into account. Any crime committed outside that area is not included in the report even though it is reported to an institution, she said.

“So, for instance, somebody reports to the public safety (department) having been raped and they are in an off-campus apartment, that’s not going to be in these numbers because we don’t have any control over that geography,” Cooter said.

Including the number of cases outside the geographic constraint is in violation of the Clery Act, she said.

Cooter also pointed out that variation exists in how crime is defined. DPS’s annual security report uses definitions on crimes and violations specified in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program that is adopted by the Clery Act.  The definition of rape, though, has been expanded by the Violence Against Women’s Act amendment in 2013, and New York state law includes references on delineation of rape and sexual assault with an object.

“So things that might be classified as one thing under the New York state law would actually have different classification under the Clery (Act),” she said.

Going forward, the university will use the report as a crime prevention tool, Callisto said in a follow-up email.

“Syracuse University reviews crime and incident data on a regular basis and uses the data to determine where to assign resources, like security and safety precautions such as DPS patrols, crime prevention programming and other educational efforts,” Callisto said.