Every year Ashland University’s Public Relation’s department sends out the Clery Report to all students. 

The Clery Report is the annual security statement that contains criminal statistics, reports, and all criminal offenses that have taken place on campus in the last three full academic years. 

This year’s report showed a large drop in criminal activity on campus from the previous year. In 2014, AU had 172 accounts of criminal activity reported, for 2015 AU only had 116 reports. 

The only location that saw an increase was reports on public property which went from one in 2014 to two in 2015.

The areas that saw a decrease were larceny and theft, alcohol violations, hate crimes, forcible sex offenses, and burglary. 

“Burglaries were way down and that was because in Kilhefner Hall the year before we had a lot of burglaries and most of it were a group of young men who were stealing from each other and were stealing from other people on the floor,” Director of Safety Services Dave McLaughlin said. “They are not here anymore. So that solved a big issue that we had with burglaries.”

Although there were areas that saw a decrease in criminal activity, there were areas that saw an increase. 

Arson on campus went from zero cases in 2014 to two cases in 2015, dating violence went from zero to one, stalking cases went from zero to one, liquor law arrests/citations went from one to five, and drug law arrests/citations went from one to nine. 

The Clery statistics give students a look at the activity for the previous year. McLaughlin pointed out that the downside with the statistics in the Clery report is that they are a year old. The statistics that safety services are dealing with currently will not be posted until October of 2017. According to McLaughlin this year so far has also been on the downslope.

“We have dealt with a few odd things like the clowns and I’m not looking forward to Halloween because it’s just been kind of crazy,” McLaughlin said. “And it’s been a contentious year with the political climate and I think that effects people too, so once we get done with November I think we will be pretty good this year.” 

To see this year’s crime log, students can go onto AU’s website and go to the safety services portion of the website under crime logs.