The Clery Act

The Clery Act

The Clery Act, passed in 1991, requires schools to provide students with timely reports of campus crimes. Howard and Connie Clery successfully convinced congress to pass legislation requiring colleges to make public, reports about crimes on campus and their security policies. Any perspective student, current student or employee must be given a copy if it is requested. The report must be completed by Oct 1 and include the three most current years of statistics. It also requires the college to provide "timely warning" to students.

The Clery Act could be a good law, but I see it as a symbolic law rather than a law with any real substance to it. The main reason that I feel like this is because colleges are a for-profit institution and a higher rate of crime could easily lower their enrollment rate. Not to mention that until the requirements for this paper were read, I had no idea that this act was even in existence. The colleges are not going to go out of their way to make it public and tell everyone about this information. They really don't want you to have it because it could shed a bad light on their school. To me that makes them unreliable.

Think that the incidents of crimes reported are underestimated on most college campuses. They want their college campus to "look good" for the prospective students. All of the major offenses are probably underestimated: murder, manslaughter, rape, etc. I think this is because of the violent nature of the crimes and the fact that most people want to believe that other people are good.

The danger of this is when something happens, such as the shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech. There was much made of the fact that many students did not receive the information that there was a shooter on campus. This could have very well resulted from the fact that officials may have underestimated the fact that this could really happen and therefore no testing or repeated trials of a warning system where in place.

I am glad to know that DMACC does not do this and they have their Rave system intact and test it regularly. And I was pleased to see that when the rash of thefts took place not too long ago, DMACC was quick to put out a warning to not only the campus in question, but to all campuses. This made me feel secure as a student on the DMACC campuses.

The only con that I can think of is that the reports have routinely shown that a student is safer on college campus rather than off college campus.