The State University of New York at Plattsburgh has successfully challenged a list that placed the campus at the top of the Most Dangerous Colleges in the country.
If you hear about a dangerous college, you’d expect statistics to reveal on-campus murders, robberies, assaults and other violent crimes. SUNY Plattsburgh’s 2014 Annual Security Report on Campus Crime and Fire Statistics shows no robberies, murders, or negligent manslaughter in 2013. There were three reports of forcible sex offenses, 11 burglaries and two aggravated assaults. So there is crime on campus, but is it enough to be number one onFind The Best’s 25 Most Dangerous Colleges? SUNY Plattsburgh Spokesman Ken Knelly says no. “We know we’re not the most dangerous campus in America, if there is such a place. I think that’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s familiar with us. The university police folks knew pretty quickly it was off in terms of the data. You have a couple of layers there. At one level a list can be subjective. It can be an opinion: best professors. But the bigger issue with this one was the data was wrong. I mean it was just wrong, false. And I imagine other colleges that were on the list would have similar issues.”
On its website, Find The Best — an online “research engine” — acknowledges “...an error in the original data used in the Feb. 3, 2015 report on dangerous colleges in the United States, which resulted in an incorrect ranking of colleges.” It has released a new listing of colleges and SUNY Plattsburgh has been removed.
What was wrong with the data? Emails to Find the Best were not returned Wednesday morning, and calls to the media relations executive were met with this message: “This number is not in use. Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”
SUNY Plattsburgh Chief of Police Arlene Sabo says there were numerous errors in the company’s assessment. “They didn’t get the concept that even though you’re reporting a crime in several categories it’s only one crime. They didn’t get that. So for example we would report on-campus crimes and then from there we would break it out. This is by law, we have to do it this way. So those that occur in residence halls get reported in two categories, twice. So that was one way. Another that befuddled me was that there was no weighting of the crimes. So if a crime was listed as a murder, a rape, a robbery it was given equal weight to if it was an arrest for an open container violation or possession of alcohol under 21.”
Sabo reports that the bulk of crimes on the Plattsburgh campus concern property, as well as alcohol and marijuana violations. “Now we do see sexual assaults, as every campus does. We do have burglaries. You’ll see some numbers in those categories. Those are the bulk of what you see on any college campus. If college campuses are telling you that they don’t have alcohol violations, that they don’t have marijuana violations, that they aren’t having sexual assaults reported to them, then I would suggest their head is in the sand.”
Sabo is not sure how many people use reports such as Find the Best’s. But the college has received calls and Chief Sabo is more concerned about the tone of the list. “They used some very scary buzzwords in order to grab people’s attention. Most dangerous. I mean that is scary. Instead of what are the crime stats, it’s most dangerous. We had calls from parents. It did scare people. It was so misleading and irresponsible really. They did retract completely and we were pleased to see that.”
The revised list of 25 Most Dangerous Colleges includes no universities from New York or Vermont. Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts is listed 24th.
Update:
Find The Best Communications Director Hillary Foss emailed WAMC Wednesday afternoon and provided information on how the ranking was initially made.
“Our initial report was faulty due to an act of human error, and for that we are disappointed. Here's a brief explanation of what happened:
First, we included all reported crimes from 2005-2012, not just 2012.
Second, we counted the total number of unique types of crime at unique locations, rather than the raw number of incidences. For example, a school with one incident at each of five locations ended up receiving a more dangerous ranking than a school with 10 incidences at one location. This means that schools where crimes were committed at a wide variety of locations (ex: off-campus, on-campus, private property, etc.) and had a large number of crime types (ex: burglary, assault, etc.) were listed as the most dangerous, regardless of the total number of incidences.
Here is the updated list and methodology: https://colleges.findthebest.com/stories/3443/dangerous-college-campuses "
