The Daily Beast/Newsweek has a slideshow ofthe "25 Most Crime-Rattled Colleges."The list takes into account various crime and population statistics, and weighs the scores for each school (see below for exact criteria). The University of Louisville comes in at number 9, slightly more dangerous than the University of Connecticut, but safer than California State University Bakersfield. Here are U of L's stats:
- Murders: 2
- Negligent Homicides: 0
- Robberies: 47
- Aggravated Assaults: 53
- Burglaries: 124
- Car Thefts: 62
- Arson: 6
We looked at four-year nonprofit private colleges and four-year public colleges with more than 6,000 total students, taking into account the numbers for each school’s primary campus and auxiliary campuses in the same metro area as the main campus. Our final dataset included more than 500 universities. The crimes we considered were: murder, negligent murder, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, car theft, and arson. Because not all crimes are the same, we devised a subjective weighting system based on crime severity. Burglary established our low-end baseline for weighting; car theft was weighted twice as much as burglary; assault and robbery, six times as much as burglary; arson and negligent manslaughter, 10 times as much as burglary; and murder, 20 times as much as burglary.
In addition to weighting, we considered each crime against total enrollment, to come up with a per-capita ratio. Finally, each per-capita ratio was compared to the overall cohort of more than 500 schools—to take into account whether each school’s per-capita ratio for each crime was relatively high or low—to determine our final list of America’s Most Crime-Rattled Colleges.
