The College Fix’s staff reporter Graham Piro and The Detroit News’s editorial page fellow Mark Naida write that the Clery Act, an act intended to make campus crime rates more available and transparent for the public, is not effective enough. The pair write:
A number of studies have raised questions concerning the law’s efficacy.
One such study, conducted by John L. Sullivan, included interviews with a number of Clery Act officers at several Colorado universities. He found that most of the officers he interviewed believed that having a dedicated Clery Act officer on staff was essential to compliance with the act and that many of the interviewees said their roles focused more on compliance with the federal law than making the information contained in the reports easy to understand.
Clery Act reporting statistics are not easily accessible and, though they were originally meant to better inform parents about crime incidents on college campuses, an earlier study by S. M Janosik showed that few parents knew those statistics were available and did not inform the college decisions of their children.
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