By Hailey Heinz
According to Northeastern’s Safety and Security Information Report, which was distributed to all students this month, there were five burglaries and three robberies on campus in 2004, for a total of eight thefts.
If that number seems low, that’s because it excludes larcenies, the largest category of property crime on college campuses. Like many colleges around the country, Northeastern doesn’t report the larcenies on campus in its annual crime report to students because it is not required by law to do so. In a more inclusive report to the FBI, which did not go out to students, Northeastern reported 345 larcenies in 2004.
A larceny is a theft committed by someone who isn’t trespassing. If an item is stolen from a building by a person who had a right to be in the building, it is considered a larceny. If a bicycle is stolen from outdoors, it is considered a larceny. Burglaries are defined as thefts that involve trespassing, and robberies are thefts such as muggings and holdups, when someone is violently forced to surrender their property.
On-campus robberies are rare and easy to define, said James Ferrier, associate director of public safety. However, there can be a gray area when it comes to classifying burglaries and larcenies, especially when thefts go unsolved, making it difficult to determine whether trespassing occurred.
Ferrier said thefts from university buildings are considered larceny, since forced entry is not required to enter the building. He said thefts from residence halls area also are generally considered larceny unless there is evidence of forced entry, although he said residence halls can be somewhat ambiguous.
“Because of the sign-in system that we have, we have a pretty good idea of when someone is in the building when they shouldn’t be, which is never,” Ferrier said. “Usually, if someone says they left their dorm room unlocked and unattended, we tend to call that a larceny … some people would call that a burglary, because we don’t know.”
Senior civil engineering major Allie Interrante said she doesn’t think larceny should be the default.
“I don’t like that they assume it’s larceny when they don’t know,” Interrante said. “They should spend more time finding out what really happened.”
Under the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, universities are required to compile their crime statistics and send a report to every student by Oct. 1 of each school year. However, the legislation does not mandate every type of crime be reported, and larcenies, along with other common campus crimes, are not requirements.
“For some reason, when Congress wrote that law, they did not require us to report some of the most common crimes that happen on campuses, such as larceny, violence and simple assault,” Ferrier said.
Most Boston-area universities do not report larcenies in their annual reports to students, although most universities, including Northeastern, report their larcenies to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the Uniform Crime Report, a public document available online. According to the larceny numbers posted there, most schools reported larceny numbers that are substantially higher than their burglary rates.
However, Northeastern’s five to 345 ratio stands out as one of the more extreme. Boston University reported 64 burglaries and 454 larcenies. Emerson College reported 16 burglaries and 33 larcenies. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported 106 burglaries and 436 larcenies.
Harvard University is one of the only colleges in the Boston area that includes larcenies in their report to students, and also has a policy of classifying thefts as burglaries if the matter is in doubt.
“We don’t feel that our students, faculty and staff are stealing from each other,” said Steve Catalano, a spokesman for the Harvard University Police Department who compiles the Harvard statistics. “We’re not na
