An article in the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate states the major colleges and university in the City University of NY system are not fully reporting campus crime statistics.  Unfortunately information like this never seems to get to the public.  Hopefully this blog will help draw attention to these reports.

Students- be vigilant.  Have fun on campus, but don't be naive to think that you live in a bubble of safety.  Be prepared, protect yourself lawfully, with pepper spray, perhaps a personal alarm and it probably wouldn't hurt to get a laptop safe to protect your valuables in your dorm either.

CUNY News in Brief

by Advocate Staff

Putting the Crim­i­nal Back in Crim­i­nal Justice

Hats off to the John Jay Col­lege of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice who made this month’s most sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to ensur­ing CUNY’s endur­ing track record of cook­ing the books. A recently released audit by the State Comptroller’s Office finds that a hand­ful of CUNY col­leges aren’t both­er­ing to report cam­pus felonies. John Jay leads the way, fail­ing to report nine­teen of twenty felonies, fol­lowed closely behind by Queens, Baruch, Hunter and Medgar Evers Col­leges, who col­lec­tively buried a whop­ping 73 per­cent of cam­pus crimes dur­ing the period under State review. Accord­ing to the Gothamist, “John Jay admin­is­tra­tors are also accused of keep­ing two sets of crime logs, one cre­ated two weeks before audi­tors arrived.”

Stu­dents, unsur­pris­ingly, were upset by the news. Speak­ing to the New York Post, John Jay sopho­more Deana Kel­ley pointed out that “I think it’s uneth­i­cal. It’s like if there’s a crime in your neigh­bor­hood, you want to know what’s going on.” A grad­u­ate stu­dent at the col­lege, Juliana Velazquez, added, “It’s shock­ing to hear you attend a criminal-justice school and there’s still crime.” Yeah, imag­ine that.

In case you were wor­ried that CUNY couldn’t care less about the safety of its stu­dents, uni­ver­sity spokesman Michael Arena reas­sured any­one who’d lis­ten that the col­leges were tak­ing con­certed action to rem­edy the sit­u­a­tion. An emer­gency two-day train­ing ses­sion for every cam­pus secu­rity direc­tor was imme­di­ately con­vened. What, exactly, these crime-fighting pro­fes­sion­als were being trained in remains unclear, but CUNY offi­cials con­tend that the prob­lem has been mean­ing­fully addressed.

Of course, as in all things, despite CUNY’s impres­sive capac­ity for inter­nal cor­rup­tion, the uni­ver­sity once again failed to beat out New York Uni­ver­sity for top hon­ors in the city. You thought our num­bers were bad? NYU failed to account for nearly 90 per­cent of its cam­pus crime last year. When all crimes com­mit­ted in the NYU’s res­i­dency halls and class­room build­ings are tal­lied up, the school ranks as the sec­ond most dan­ger­ous cam­pus in the coun­try. And here we were think­ing those kids on Wash­ing­ton Square were just a bunch of poseurs!