Investigate safety trends around college and university campuses

The most recent reports on alleged campus crime, arrests, discipline and hate crimes reported for 2014 are now available in the NICAR data library.  Buy it here.

What's in it?

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act is a federal law that requires colleges and universities to disclose certain timely and annual information about campus crime and security policies. All public and private institutions of postsecondary education participating in federal student aid programs under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 are subject to it. The information contained in each report is based on the calendar year (Jan. 1 through Dec. 31) in which the crime was reported to campus officials. We've compiled and cleaned the data.

Data is available for 2001 through 2014.  For more information, check out the NICAR Readme file and the record layouts (.xls format) for the data tables.

What format is it in?

The older years of campus crime data (2001 - 2009) are available in DBF format. The newer years (2010 - 2014) are in CSV format.

For the 2010 - 2014 data NICAR combined some of the tables to make the data easier to analyze. Prior years have 16 tables whereas 2014 only has eight: crime, arrests and discipline reports for each location type (e.g. oncampus) are grouped together. Take a look at our sample (.xls format), and read the documentation for more information. We are working on standardizing prior years as well.

How can I use it?

You can use the data ​to look at reports over time, by campus. You can also find out how well your local institute of higher education is reporting its crime statistics as required under the Clery Act.

The IRE Resource Center offers tipsheets, stories and audio that will help you cover accountability in higher education:

"Campus coverage: Sexual assault and other crimes on campus" offers tips for covering crime in higher education. You can also download the audio of the panel, which features Walt Bogdanich, David Donald, Jill Riepenhoff and Samantha Sunne.

Read and listen to our blog post, "AUDIO: The FERPA exception every reporter should know," which offers tips on reporting around The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Read Samantha Sunne's story "Sex offenses on campus" and her submission to the 2013 IRE Awards, which was a finalist in the student category. 

In "Accountability Reporting in Higher Education", Kristen Lombardi talks about finding sources and data, and points to a toolkit developed by the Center for Public Integrity for covering campus crime. See the Center's submission to the 2009 IRE Awards, which was a finalist for the FOI Award.

How much does it cost?

The entire database (all years) costs $25 for IRE members, $75 for all others. To purchase, visit https://www.ire.org/nicar/database-library/databases/doe-campus-crime/ or contact the Data Library staff at (573) 884-7711 or datalib@ire.org.