By Beatrice Jin
The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act was passed in 1990. The act mandates that colleges and universities keep a public log of reported and alleged campus crimes of up to 60 days. Cornell University Police Department also keeps a such a log from the past 60 days, and 7 years of the crime logs are kept on file for public inspection at CUPD in Barton Hall.
Few students know about the existence of these logs; even fewer know that it is their right to inspect these statistics. According to investigators at CUPD, I was the first person in the past 30 years to have physically gone and inspected the past crime logs. As of today, two users are tweeting from the hashtag #CornellCrimeLog. This visualization is an attempt to make this information more accessible to the public.
The following two interactive graphs show the number of reported incidents that occur each day. In the top chart, weekends are in grey. They often have relatively high reported incidents, many which are alcohol related. There seems to be a spike in reports during O-week and right before Halloween, despite Kathy Zoner's impassioned weekend email.
After agency assistance and alcohol offense, larceny (generally known as theft) is by far the most reported incident type. Some common stolen items include phones, purses, and laptops. Other unusual stolen items include four Monster Red Bulls (Oct. 6, from P&C Fresh), approximately 50 shopping carts (Oct. 9, also from P&C Fresh), a secured stone statue (Oct. 14, from the International Lounge), an eight-foot ladder (Oct. 26, from 2 Forest Park Lane), and copper pipes (Nov. 14, Appel Commons boiler room). The Red Bulls and ladder were recovered intact.
When sorted by location, Barton Hall, College Avenue, and Mary Donlon Hall have the most reported incidents (31, 20, and 13 incidents, respectively). Following closely, 10 out of 11 incidents at the Cornell Store had to do with larceny. There was one case of aggravated assault on staff through harassing emails and telephone messages (Oct. 26). Writing on bathroom walls is still a popular sport and categorized as criminal mischief. Graffiti is reported in Snee Hall and Olin Library. There were 13 incidents reported in fraternities this semester.
If you are interested in contributing to the dataset or this project, please contact me at beatricezjin (at) gmail (dot) com, or visit the Github page for this project. The full dataset used in this visualization is available here. Thanks to Edy for helping collect coordinates of over a hundred locations in Ithaca.