Campus Crime

Abstract

AbstractAlthough crime on college and university campuses in the United States has existed since their founding and despite available data, unanswered questions remain about the scope and nature of the problem. Notwithstanding these knowledge gaps, beginning in the late 1980s and the 1990s campus crime was “discovered” by the media and various interest groups, whose claims about the problem spurred efforts by policy makers, the courts, and postsecondary administrators to address it. The effects of their efforts, however, have not been well documented, as most have never been evaluated. Ultimately the picture that emerges from 30 years of available research is that college campuses are neither immune to the problem of crime and violence, nor are they hot beds of murder, mayhem, and vice as commonly depicted by the media.