2016 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report Available

In an email sent out last week, Hood’s Director of Campus Safety Thurmond Maynard said, “Hood College’s, “2016 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report,” is now available.

This report is required by federal law and contains policy statements, along with crime and fire statistics for the school. The policy statements address the school’s policies, procedures and programs concerning safety and security, crime awareness, and preventive measures you can take to reduce your chances of becoming a victim.

In the report, there are “three years’ worth of statistics are included for certain types of crimes and three years of fire incident data that were reported to have occurred on campus, in or on off-campus buildings or property owned or controlled by the school and on public property within or immediately adjacent to the campus.”

Looking over the report, one would find nothing uncharacteristic of a small, private college’s campus: low crime across the board, and the typical college incidents in high numbers.

As one might expect, theft is quite low on campus with only three cases of theft in the past three years. Off campus, there have been seven cases of theft, one of them being motor vehicle theft.

However, there have been seven cases of forcible sexual assault on campus over the past three years and altogether five cases of sexual assault and dating violence off campus.

The numbers for both theft and assault have gone ​down over the past 3 years. However, drug law violations have not been consistent.

There were seven total in 2015, 17 in 2014, and seven in 2013. What stands out the most, however, are the number of liquor law violations.

In 2015, there were 75 cases on campus. Off campus there were zero.

This number has been increasing steadily since 2013, going from five off campus and five on campus in 2013 to 47 on campus and two off campus in 2014. This is likely because of tightened and increased security and monitoring of student dorms.

Surely, the number of violations has not changed as much as the number of people caught has. Thankfully, there have been zero cases of bias/hate crimes on campus as well as only one fire.

This data supports the claim that Hood is a safe campus. With increased security, one can feel good knowing that help is close by and always on the lookout for potential hazards.