Tufts experienced a dramatic spike in violent crimes last year, according to recently released statistics from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.
While three such crimes were reported on the Medford/Somerville campus in 2005, the 2006 number jumped 333 percent to 13 crimes.
According to Director of Environmental and Public Safety John King, however, since Tufts deals with such small numbers of violent crime, the increase is not as much of a "prolific problem" as it would be if the university had more instances of crime to begin with.
In the FBI's statistics, violent crimes include murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
Robberies at Tufts increased from one to three, and aggravated assaults from one to seven. Forcible rapes climbed from one to three, and no murder or non-negligent manslaughter cases were reported either year.
Property crimes also were on the rise, going from 120 in 2005 to 149 in 2006. Within this category, the number of burglaries jumped from 22 to 28, and the number of larcenies from 95 to 121.
Other schools in the Boston area also experienced changes in the various categories, with many of them showing increases.
It is difficult, however, to accurately compare the numbers across campuses, according to Stephen Fischer, Jr., the chief of multimedia productions at the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division of the FBI.
While some organizations use the FBI's numbers to create rankings, he said that these groupings are often not helpful.
"These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state or region," he said in an e-mail.
At colleges and universities, these variables include the number of students, the male-female ratio and the accessibility of the campus to outsiders.
Another important factor, according to King, is that these statistics only represent reported crimes. As a result, an increase could actually indicate the success of crime prevention programs, which aim to encourage the reporting of incidents.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for example, saw five forcible rapes in 2006, up from zero in 2005.
This, however, marks the third year of MIT's use of a federal grant designed to prevent sexual assaults on college campuses. According to Maryanne Kirkbride, the clinical director for campus life at MIT, this carries with it a change in student mentality.
"The main goal is to create a campus climate [where] people feel comfortable reporting if something bad happens to them," she said. "One of the markers of success is to have your reporting numbers go up."
Though the statistics make it look as though the overall number of sexual assaults is increasing, this is not the case, Kirkbride said.
Similarly, Harvard University reported a 57 percent increase in violent crimes between 2005 and 2006, going from 7 to 11.
But according to University Police Department Public Information Officer Steven Catalano, crime is actually going down on campus and the number of violent crimes has remained "fairly constant."
Even if numbers at some colleges have not remained constant, King said that this would not be out of the ordinary, as fluctuations in crime patterns are to be expected.
"It goes back and forth," he said. "You don't get a gradual [rise], you don't get a gradual decline." King described the shifts in patterns as being more like "peaks and valleys."
In response to the recent "peak," however, local campus officers aim to do all they can to lower current numbers.
Besides police presence, blue light phones and a well-lit campus, crime prevention also entails educating and reaching out to the community.
"It's a combination of what we do and what the community does," Catalano said.
King recommends that students walk in groups, call for police escorts if necessary, lock their doors and keep track of their belongings.
Moving forward, he said that his office will continue to try to increase awareness on campus and to be ready to respond when necessary.
"From a visibility standpoint our officers are on alert - always have been," he said.
And while he is concerned about the increase in campus crime, the UCR statistics are not surprising to him. "I don't need to wait for the FBI to publish their annual crime report to know what happened," he said.
