The number of reported burglaries at Boston University plummeted 40 percent from 2003 to 2004, according to the most recent campus crime statistics released by the Boston University Police Department.
Even with this sharp decrease, BU had the third-highest amount of reported burglaries of Boston area colleges in 2004, trailing only Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2003, the BUPD reported a total of 130 burglaries. BUPD saw its burglary total drop to 78 in its 2004 crime reports, which is also the lowest rate since 2001 when 68 burglaries were committed at BU.
Sgt. Jack St. Hilaire, of the BUPD, attributed the 40 percent drop in burglaries to increased faculty and student awareness.
“The number one reason for such a sharp decline in thefts is due to faculty and students taking more precautions,” he said. “The prime reason burglaries occur is simply negligence. Three quarters of the thefts on campus can be avoided, if you just take simple precautions.”
The 130 burglaries from 2003 ranks as the highest BU has seen in a four-year span, outdistancing the second-highest, 2002, by 46 burglaries.
When asked why 2003 showed a disproportionately high spike in crime, St. Hilaire said that crime comes and goes in waves.
“Sometimes, professionals will target an area and until they are arrested or decide to move on, there will be a spike in the crime statistics. For example, a few years ago, professional scam artists from New York City targeted this area and we saw fraud cases jump significantly.
“It’s analogous to having a serial killer move into an area,” he said. “That area would then see a sharp spike in their homicides, whether or not their murder rate was high or low the year before the serial killer moved in. It’s hard to predict something like that, which is why it’s hard to pin down why a certain crime statistic jumps dramatically from year to year,” he added.
According to the 2004 FBI uniform crime report, Northeastern University and Emerson College had the fewest recorded burglaries of the colleges in the Boston metropolitan area. Northeastern reported five burglaries and Emerson 16, numbers that BU easily tops with 78.
St. Hilaire said the reasons BU’s burglary rate is much higher than Northeastern’s or Emerson’s is strongly related to environment and geography.
“While Northeastern’s campus is also a city-type campus, it is more closed than BU’s. It’s more similar to Harvard in that respect. BU’s campus is less secure because it’s more spread out and connected to the city. BU’s campus is just like downtown Boston. Our layout is the quintessential urban campus. And as far as Emerson is concerned, it is much smaller.”
Most universities categorize burglary and larceny separately in their crime reports, which greatly reduces the amount of reported burglaries because larcenies are largest category of property crime on college campuses.
Northeastern, for example, doesn’t report the larcenies on campus in its annual crime report to students because the law does not require it. In the more inclusive uniform crime report to the FBI, which did not go out to students, Northeastern reported 345 larcenies in 2004.
Boston University does include larcenies in its reports released to the campus community.
A larceny is a theft committed by someone who is not trespassing. For example, if a student or staff member steals an item from Warren Towers, it is considered a larceny.
Burglaries are defined as thefts that involve trespassing, and robberies are thefts such as muggings and holdups, when someone is violently forced to surrender their property.
On-campus robberies are rare and easy to define, said James Ferrier, associate director of Northeastern’s public safety department. But there is often a gray area when it comes to classifying burglaries and larcenies, especially when thefts go unsolved, making it difficult to determine whether trespassing occurred.
Ferrier said thefts from university buildings are considered larceny, because forced entry is not required to enter the building. He said thefts from residence halls area also are generally considered larceny unless there is evidence of forced entry, although he said residence halls can be somewhat ambiguous.
“Because of the sign-in system that we have, we have a pretty good idea of when someone is in the building when they shouldn’t be, which is never,” Ferrier said. “Usually, if someone says they left their dorm room unlocked and unattended, we tend to call that a larceny. Some people would call that a burglary, because we don’t know.”
Under the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, universities are required to compile their crime statistics and send a report to every student by Oct. 1 of each school year. However, the legislation does not mandate every type of crime be reported, and larcenies, along with other common campus crimes, are not requirements.
“For some reason, when Congress wrote that law, they did not require us to report some of the most common crimes that happen on campuses, such as larceny, violence and simple assault,” Ferrier said.
Most Boston-area universities do not report larcenies in their annual reports to students, although most universities, including Northeastern, report their larcenies to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the Uniform Crime Report. According to the FBI uniform reports, colleges usually reported larceny numbers that were substantially higher than their burglary rates.
However, Northeastern’s ratio of five burglaries to 345 larcenies greatly differs from the ratios for the other Boston-area colleges. Boston University reported 64 burglaries and 454 larcenies. Emerson College reported 16 burglaries and 33 larcenies. MIT reported 106 burglaries and 436 larcenies.
Harvard University is one of the only other colleges in the Boston area that includes larcenies in its report to students, and the school also has a policy of classifying thefts as burglaries if the matter is in doubt.
Because of its classification policy, Harvard’s crime statistics stand out. In its annual report, Harvard, which leads Boston area schools in reported burglary rate by a wide margin, is reported to have had 446 on-campus burglaries last year, while its nearest rival was MIT with 106.
“We don’t feel that our students, faculty and staff are stealing from each other,” said Steve Catalano, a spokesman for the Harvard University Police Department who compiles the Harvard statistics. “We’re not naïve, but we’re not going to assume that every single thing that was stolen was stolen by someone who had a right to be there. Our default position is that unless we can prove otherwise, we make the assumption that it’s someone who’s not affiliated with the university.”
Although Harvard makes these statistics readily available, Ferrier said this is the exception, not the norm, and Northeastern reports crime the way it does in order to stay comparable to other universities. He said most universities around the country report only the crimes they are required to report by the Clery Act, and so Northeastern does the same to avoid seeming like a campus with a crime problem.
“Until everyone reports it, we choose to do just what everyone else does and include in the publication just the ones that are required,” Ferrier said.
Catalano, on the other hand, said parents and students should have access to all the statistics to make an informed decision about where their child should attend college.
“If the goal of publishing crime statistics is to allow students, faculty, staff and parents who are looking to make informed decision about the safety of that campus, not having the larcenies is defeating that purpose,” Catalano said.
Others argued that the Clery reports were a sufficient barometer of crime, adding that there is a correlation between Clery-reported burglaries and general crime levels.
Even if larcenies and burglaries are added together, Harvard still reports a high level of crime among top universities — 675 combined burglaries and larcenies as compared to MIT’s 444.