UMass raps data as 'Primetime' prepares to air crime report

AMHERST -- An ABC news program will report tonight that the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has the highest rate of violent crime on a campus of its size, but UMass officials dispute the contention, saying the television network employed flawed methodology and old data.

The school has undertaken a vigorous effort to prevent the segment from airing on ''Primetime." The university system's general counsel, Terence O'Malley, wrote a letter last week to David Westin, ABC News president, saying, ''This story will have a serious and deleterious effect on our college, its outstanding reputation, its students, faculty, and alumni, and we ask that you temporarily withhold the story from broadcast and allow us to meet with you and your producers to discuss our concerns."

The school has also turned to an alumnus, James Kallstrom, a former assistant FBI director, to argue its case.

ABC spokeswoman Alyssa Apple said the program would air tonight. ''We are reporting numbers that we received from the Department of Education," she said. ''We gave all schools an opportunity to respond to our reporting."

The segment, Apple said, will report that among schools of more than 11,000 students, UMassAmherst had the most violent crimes per student. Apple said the findings are based on 2002 and 2003 data provided by the US Department of Education, which culls the figures from reports from the schools. Apple said all the schools had not reported 2004 crime data when the news program conducted its reporting and analysis.

''It would have been less accurate and less complete to use those numbers," Apple said.

But UMass officials said the 2004 data are now available and should have been used as well, even if it required reworking the findings and delaying the broadcast. In 2004, the number of violent crimes dropped by about half at UMass-Amherst. UMass reported 28 violent crimes in 2004 compared with 57 in 2002 and 58 in 2003.

The school also contends that the news program improperly calculated the rate of violent crime by dividing the number of crimes by the total enrollment rather than by the number of on-campus residents.

''Just as you would not include visitors, commuters, and tourists to calculate the crime rate among a city's population, neither should an aggregate number including off-campus students be included in a calculation of an on-campus crime rate," O'Malley, the general counsel, wrote to ABC News.

James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who has studied campus crime, agreed with UMass officials, saying there is a direct correlation between the number of on-campus residents and the number of campus crimes, in part because the more students who live on campus, the greater the opportunity for crime to occur on campus.

''The best predictor of college crime is the number of students who live on campus," he said.

Fox added that schools such as UMass-Amherst also tend to have higher crime rates than urban ones, because they often have the greatest concentrations of people and wealth in a rural setting -- making them target areas.

UMass officials attributed the decline in crime from 2003 to 2004 to new security measures such as security cameras, a K-9 unit, and better education of students about campus risks.

Officials also cited ''improved counting and classifying of crimes."

Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@globe.com.