Parents who send their kids to the University of South Carolina may be getting a falsely reassuring pitch from the administration on the school’s crime statistics, a staff editorial in The Daily Gamecock says.
It has to do with the timing and scope of the administration’s crime stats:
USC’s storyline basically follows this pattern: On Parents Weekend, the university released a two-page handout concerning crime on campus to try to quell parents’ troubled questions before they’re asked. …
First off, 2014 isn’t over yet. The huge jump from 415 crimes in 2013 to 281 this year is only representative of every month before October, which the university points out in a footnote. But for the last two years, October was the month with the most reported crime.
While there is no guarantee that the same October crime “bump” will repeat itself this year, we feel that the statistics presented in the handout paints a incomplete picture. Printing it at a time when all the data isn’t yet available is inherently misleading, and serves to bolster the reputation of the university when the information simply isn’t in yet.
The paper also accuses the school of obscuring the “rampant” period for crime – August and September – by focusing the pamphlet on “the entire year’s worth of crime, further muddying the picture.”
Read the full editorial here.
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