With the release of the CMU Annual Campus Safety report in the last week, students now have recourse to know about various crimes and offenses committed around campus. We encourage students to see the report online and understand the changing demographics of crime at CMU as our university grows.
As the school grows, certain statistics are going to go up, which was present with increased drug and alcohol offenses in 2012 over 2011. It seems like that increase is a fairly natural part of being a growing university with an increasing population of students, most of which will choose to indulge in drugs or alcohol at some point during their college career.

Luckily, certain numbers aren’t following the trend as their intoxicating counterparts.

There was certainly no increase in sexual assault with the increase in student population, with 6 reported cases in 2011 dropping to 2 in 2012. While many of these crimes go unreported, various school programs have educated and informed students in an effort to quell sexual and domestic abuse crimes. No robberies have been reported for two years, and the rates of crimes like aggravated assault (2 in 2012) and burglary (13 in 2011 and 14 in 2012) have stayed the same over the last three years, obviously not being fueled by an increase in total student population.

If you take the difference in student population size into account, the numbers are lower than other Colorado universities like CU and CSU. However, for the size of their schools, their numbers were about as comfortably low as CMU’s.

CMU has the advantage of being a tight-knit university. Support networks of counseling services and informative sessions aimed at deterring violent and sexual crime are common and well-publicized. The campus also has a dedicated group of police officers and is backed up by an equally safe surrounding community.

As the school grows, we can always hire more cops. However, we may have to find sustainable ways to keep that support and information network growing in scale for a university that has the propensity to double in size as it has in the last few years.