On Wednesday night, Public Safety released its annual security and fire safety report in an email to the DePauw community.
The annual report, which is released as part of compliance to the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act from the Department of Education, provided Public Safety policies and a number of statistics involving crime at the university, as well as fire numbers.
The report listed reported crimes and fires from 2009 through 2011 and showed that most criminal activity has been consistent over the past three years.
The one drop - arrests and citations from liquor law violations.
According to the report, in 2011, 13 arrests for violation of liquor laws occured on DePauw's campus. That number is exactly half of the 26 from 2010 and a fraction of the 40 arrests in 2009. For citations, there were 12 cases of citations for liquor law violations in 2011 compared to 28 and 40 from 2010 and 2009, respectively.
And while those numbers have fallen, judicial referrals, or incidents that Public Safety or other organizations alert to DePauw community standards, have remained relatively consistent, hanging around the 190 range.
Bill Tobin, director of institutional research, said that numbers like that can be misleading, especially when the changes are occurring in numbers that are relatively small to begin with.
Still, Angie Nally, director of Public Safety, said that the drop in arrests may be due to some strategy changes that occurred over the past few years. She said public safety officers now will give intoxicated persons the chance to call and be picked up by a sober friend.
Nally said that the crimes reported are not limited to DePauw students, as the report covers all crimes that occur on DePauw campus. This means that any arrest, citation or incident reported on campus - regardless of whether the perpetrator is a student or if Greencastle Police react to the incident - is compiled within the study.