Content Warning: This article contains mention of sexual assault and other violent crimes.

Editor’s Note: City on a Hill Press reached out to multiple organizations and clubs for comment and was informed they did not want to or could not speak to press for various reasons including privacy concerns. 

A “data entry error” resulted in UC Santa Cruz misreporting 33 Clery Crime Statistics in its 2023 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report (ASFSR). A majority of these crimes were Title IX-related offenses, including but not limited to rape, stalking, and dating violence.

The annual Clery Crime Statistics provides an overall picture of crime at UCSC from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 for the past three fiscal years. This means the 2023 report contained statistics from 2020-22, and the 2024 report contained statistics from 2021-23. They include statistics relating to Title IX violations, as well as murder, thievery, assault, and arson. In its footnotes, the 2024 ASFSR that was released Oct. 1 contained corrections for the 2022 statistics that were misreported in last year’s report. 

The statistical errors were published in a July California State Auditor’s report, written by Grant Parks. The report stated that UCSC’s last Clery coordinator left her position in June 2023, before the 2023 ASFSR was published. As a result, the university had to rely on other staff in its Risk and Safety Services office to compensate for her absence, which included assigning an interim project coordinator to compile the 2022 Clery statistics. The report did not identify the previous Clery coordinator by name.

“In the absence of written guidance, the staff in the Risk & Safety Services office did not use the files that the previous Clery coordinator used, and they did not have access to the databases that the university police department, the Title IX office, or the Student Conduct office use,” the auditor’s report stated. “As a result, the staff at the Risk and Safety Services office compiled the statistics that each of the departments gave them but did not check the accuracy of those numbers.”

University spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason said that the previous Clery coordinator exited her role after being recruited to a higher-level role at the UC Office of the President. He attributed the data entry error to a misunderstanding.

“The team that compiled the 2022 statistics believed the prior Clery coordinator had already cross-checked and integrated the statistics prior to her departure. This misunderstanding impacted all of the statistics,” Hernandez-Jason wrote in an email to City on a Hill Press. “There was a data entry error because Clery-reportable crimes were not tracked in a central location.”  

Since the last Clery compliance coordinator resigned, the position has yet to be permanently filled. According to Hernandez-Jason, the interim Clery compliance coordinator is currently Christina Armstrong. 

Parks provided details regarding the Clery coordinator’s position in the July audit report which included the reasoning given by the university for the misreported statistics.

“Santa Cruz explained that it did not report any Title IX incidents or incidents from local law enforcement agencies in 2022 because the interim coordinator was not aware of the need to request Clery statistics from the Title IX office nor aware of the need to separately request statistics from the local law enforcement agencies; she thought they were already included in statistics provided by the university police department,” Parks stated in his audit.

The Annual Security and Fire Safety Report

ASFSRs are released annually for each fiscal year and contain policies and procedures related to campus safety. All college campuses are legally required to include the Clery Crime Statistics in the report. 

The legal requirement for universities to publish campus crime statistics originated from the Jeanne Clery Act, which is part of the Higher Education Act. Its goal is to ensure that students, parents, and employees have access to accurate crime and security information about their college campus. 

“Accurate and complete disclosure of policies and a clear articulation of the institution’s programs are essential to this goal [of the Clery Act],” Parks stated in his audit. “Any failure in this area deprives the campus community of vital campus safety information and effectively negates the intent of the Clery Act.”

In 2022, 672 Clery crimes were reported to the U.S. Department of Education (ED) from UCSC. UC San Diego (UCSD) had 216 crimes that were reported, and they are a larger campus in regards to both students enrolled and acreage. This means UCSC had 456 more crimes reported in 2022 than UCSD did.

The California State Audit report’s review of 60 crimes at UCSC for the 2023 report found that UCSC did not include seven reportable crimes in its Clery statistics. There were five Title IX-related crimes (rape, fondling, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking) from the 2023 ASFSR that needed corrections, as well as two non-Title-IX-related crimes (burglary, and liquor law arrest). 

“Santa Cruz did not report these seven crimes because it lacked written procedures

for compiling Clery statistics. The significance of this deficiency became more

evident when the person who normally compiled Clery statistics left the institution,” the audit report stated.

For Title IX-related crimes, the statistics for “Rape On Campus” were corrected from 17 to 25, and the statistics for “Rape Campus Residential” were corrected from 17 to 24. “Fondling On Campus” was corrected from 4 to 14 incidents, and “Fondling Campus Residential” was corrected from 3 to 10 incidents. “Domestic Violence On Campus” was corrected from 6 to 7 incidents. “Dating Violence On Campus” was corrected from 0 to 2 incidents, and “Dating Violence Campus Residential” was changed from 0 to 1 incidents. “Stalking On Campus” was changed from 14 to 30 incidents, and “Stalking Campus Residential” was changed from 8 to 18 incidents.

According to the ASFSR’s “Clery Geography,” or the various locations under UCSC jurisdiction where these crimes can occur, an “On Campus” crime includes buildings and property within campus boundaries. A “Campus Residential” crime refers to on-campus housing facilities, and a “Noncampus” crime covers UCSC-related properties off campus, such as the UCSC Coastal Campus or study abroad programs. 

For the non-Title-IX-related crimes, the statistics for “Burglary Noncampus” were corrected from zero to one, and the statistics for “Liquor Law Arrest On Campus” were changed from zero to three. 

The State Auditor found that a large issue in UCSC’s 2023 ASFSR that led to the misreporting of crime statistics was an incomplete daily crime log. Completed daily crime logs are required by the Clery Act because they provide a more in-depth overview of campus safety when paired with the annual Clery reports.

UCSC was missing a significant number of crimes from its logs, with 22 out of 60 crimes the State Auditor reviewed being absent.

“We found that the primary reason institutions did not include certain types of incidents in the daily crime logs is that different departments, such as the Title IX and student conduct offices, did not report to the campus security office the incidents that were reported to them,” Parks stated in his audit.

Consequences of the Data Entry Error 

California State Auditor Grant Parks reviewed six California institutions’ Clery Crime Statistics, including UCSC’s. The audit report was published in July, titled Clery Act: Six California Colleges and Universities We Visited Struggled to Report Accurate Campus Safety Information. 

The audit revealed that in UCSC’s 2023 ASFSR, the crime statistics were inaccurate or incomplete, and the university did not disclose all campus safety policies, procedures, and programs that the Clery Act requires. UCSC also lacked sufficient procedures for staff to follow when creating Clery Act reports due to inadequate training on the act and its requirements. 

“By not including [the seven] serious crimes in its Clery statistics as required, Santa Cruz presented its campus as safer than it was,” Parks stated in his audit. “The institution became aware of its underreporting after we began our audit, and it agreed that it should implement procedures, such as written guidance for its staff to follow when compiling the Clery statistics, to ensure that it reports all Clery crimes.”

State law requires the State Auditor to review at least six institutions that receive federal student aid every three years. The State Audit report was first issued in 2003, and over the past 21 years with 41 universities inspected, the State Auditor has found noncompliance with Clery Act requirements at all 41 institutions. According to the July report, State Auditors have “consistently found that the institutions reviewed were not fully complying with Clery Act requirements.” 

The State Auditor’s findings can prompt the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to issue fines of up to approximately $70,000 for each violation. The report listed UC Berkeley (UCB) as an example of these fines, stating that in 2020 ED fined them $2.35 million for Clery Act violations and for a lack of sufficient administrative capability to oversee its Clery Act reporting. ED stated that UCB did not report hate crimes in two annual security reports and did not disclose security policies in multiple annual security reports. 

Although UCSC was also found to be in violation of multiple requirements of the Clery Act, it is not yet clear if the university has or will receive any monetary consequences. When asked what the consequences of the data entry error were, Scott Hernandez-Jason did not mention any fines.

As a result of the audit’s findings, UCSC is required to establish procedures by January 2025 to improve the accuracy and completeness of its Clery Act statistics. These procedures include identifying all campus departments and law enforcement agencies that track crime data, setting protocols for data collection, implementing specific guidelines for staff to determine which crimes or incidents should be included, ensuring all crimes are recorded in a daily crime log, and fully disclosing all required policies in its annual safety reports.

In response to the suggestions given to the university, the audit report included a letter from Chancellor Cynthia Larive to Grant Parks detailing a plan to incorporate five recommendations from the draft report the university received in advance of its final publication. Her plan included standardizing crime data reporting and implementing regular training for staff responsible for compliance by January 2025. 

“UCSC takes compliance responsibilities seriously and agrees with each of the recommendations outlined in the draft audit report,” Larive stated in the letter. “UCSC is eager to implement these recommendations and is already working to improve the transparency of our public safety information and compliance with the Clery Act based on the productive engagement we have had with your team.”

Corrections Continue

Despite Chancellor Larive’s statements, UCSC released a statement on Nov. 12 informing the UCSC community that there had been a republication of the 2024 ASFSR because multiple errors were found within its most recent 2023 crime statistics that were published Oct. 1. 

One of the corrections was for the “Hate Crime On Campus” statistic, which was edited for clarity.

“Updates to Clery reports are fairly common given the volume and complexity of the information. The Department of Education allows updates in their portal through April of the following year to the previous year’s report and after that, updates that are needed must be made in the report for the following year,” Scott Hernandez-Jason wrote in an email to City on a Hill Press.

The other errors found within the report were in the Stalking and Rape categories, both of which not only fall under Title IX-related incidents, but were misreported in 2022 as well. This means that even after the recommendations from the State Auditor were acknowledged by the university, Title IX-related incidents were once again underreported. 

“For 2023, the Rape statistics were changed from 22 On-Campus to 24 On-Campus and from 19 Campus Residential to 21 Campus Residential to correct errors which were identified during a routine internal audit,”  the UCSC Newscenter statement said. “Stalking statistics were changed from 19 On-Campus to 20 On-Campus and from 8 Campus Residential to 9 Campus Residential.”

According to the Clery Center website, universities are under a legal obligation to follow through with the Clery Act and “understand what the law entails.”

To fully comply with Clery Act requirements, providing transparency around campus crime statistics and policies is key. The grounds on which the Clery Act was made are relevant now as they were back when Jeanne Clery’s parents lobbied for its creation after she was assaulted and murdered in her dorm room in the 1980s.

As Jeanne Clery’s parents said, “The best education in the world is useless if a student does not survive with a healthy mind and body.”