by Dick Hall-Sizemore

It turns out that the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) campus is not as safe as it  purports to be.

Federal law requires institutions of higher education to publish the number of crimes committed on, and adjacent to, campus. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports today that the university has discovered that it has been significantly under-reporting the number of crimes.

For example, in 2022, there were 287 reported acts of dating violence, yet the university’s published report lists only 12. There were similar discrepancies in other categories, although the dating violence category was the one most seriously out of whack.

In the dating violence category, the discrepancy is somewhat understandable. Of the 287 reported incidences, 244 of them resulted from “a single person reporting several instances of dating violence every week for an entire semester.” The staff compiling the published report may have thought that the number of victims, rather than the number of instances, were to be included in the report. However, federal law requires that each act be counted separately.

The university denies that there was any intention to play down the number of crimes. It blames several systemic problems: untrained staff, staff turnover, and multiple venues in which crimes could be reported, with no consistency and coordination in recording and reporting them.

The university has recently hired a full-time compliance officer for reporting crime.

My Soapbox

The real kicker, as far as I am concerned, is that the university, upon learning of the problem, paid $400,000 to a consultant “to get at the root of the problem.” That consultant “examined reports of crimes dating back to 2021.” $400,000! The university has graduate programs in criminal justice, public administration, and public policy and administration. This could have been a class project in any one of those programs. They could have hired several of those students to do that work for much less money. Hell, I could have done it for a lot less than $400,000.