USU campus officials say security report lacks data

Utah State University’s administration and police said the school’s Annual Security and Fire Safety Report lacks data.

On Monday, an email was sent to students and faculty informing them about the annual security report, which contains information on campus security and crime and fire statistics. 

USU’s Director of Crisis Communications and Issues Management Amanda DeRito said while administrators and police are doing their best to gather data, the data in the report does not reflect the actual number of what’s occurring. 

“A lot of crimes are underreported, particularly crimes involving sexual assault, domestic violence and stalking,” DeRito said. “They’re really unreported across the nation so we have to use other ways to get the data on those.”

DeRito encouraged students to report more crimes and said the annual report “is part of our overall efforts to be as transparent as possible, to make sure students know what they need to take care of their own safety.”

Sgt. Joseph Huish, the campus safety administrator, said the annual report only contains what has been reported to campus police. 

“To say those are the entire amount of instances would be naïve,” he said. “We know that more things happen than are reported to us but the only things we can report on are what’s been reported.”

Huish said campus police are taking steps to better protect people on campus.

“We’re working with administrators to try and get more officers on board so we can be consistent with our size, we’re quite shorthanded in that way,” he said. “We’re trying to have a bigger presence on campus and we feel that makes the campus a safer place, when people know the police are out and available.”

Huish said the rest of the data was fairly consistent compared to older data from past years, but the crime rates have gone down since 2016. 

Katie, an advocate from Sexual Assault and Anti-Violence Information, said students can come and talk to advocates about sexual assault. 

“People don’t know there’s a confidential place they can talk,” she said. “With our cultural climate that we still unfortunately have it’s really hard for people to come forward. Come and talk to one of our advocates. There are people you can talk to and there are people that want to listen to you and believe you.”