Occidental’s Civil Rights & Title IX Coordinator Alexandra Fulcher released the 2023 Annual Fire Safety and Security Report for Occidental College, commonly known as the Clery Report, in a campus-wide email Sept. 29. The report stated that, in 2022, there were four instances of sexual assault in student housing and 13 instances of stalking women on campus. The report also stated 21 drug abuse violations, and 50 liquor law violations, the highest number of reports since 2020.
According to Director of Campus Safety Rick Tanksley, the nearly triple drug abuse violations and increase in liquor law violations from 2021-2022 can be attributed to the return of first-year students on campus. Tanksley said that both numbers reflect the students that were referred to the Office of Student Conduct and that Campus Safety was not involved in those incidents.
According to Fulcher, the report is required by federal statute and documents all statistics regarding certain crimes within Occidental’s Clery jurisdiction, which includes the campus as well as the surrounding area.
Tanksley said that his office provides much of the crime data to Fulcher, who compiles it in the Clery Report.
“Since we, Campus Safety, [are] in charge of the daily crime report and crimes that occur on campus, we provide her with all those statistics,” Tanksley said.
According to Tanksley, for the most part, Occidental’s Clery Report reflects well on the general safety of the campus, especially for its location near Los Angeles.
“Considering where we are in a major metropolitan area, not set aside out in a field somewhere, I would consider us to have a relatively safe campus,” Tanksley said
According to Tanksley, the statistics in the report are proof of this claim.
“When I look strictly at the statistics, at the crime statistics that Clery mandates we must report,” Tanksley said. “What do you see? You see a bunch of zeroes, really.”
However, Tanksley, who spent 32 years in law enforcement and 15 years as a chief of police, also said that the feeling of safety can be subjective, especially for victims of crime.
“Safety is in the eye of the beholder,” Tanksley said. “If you were a victim of crime, you may not think this is a safe campus, no matter what the statistics tell you.”
Tanksley said additionally that the recent surge in Peeping Toms does not fall under Clery Report jurisdiction but also that he chooses to alert the campus about it, even though he is not mandated to.
In the same email in which the Clery Report was released, Fulcher also released a separate annual report from the Civil Rights & Title IX Office on sexual and interpersonal misconduct, titled the 2022-23 Summary of Reports.
“This report is not required by law,” Fulcher said in the email. “It is compiled by the College to provide a more complete account of the misconduct reported to the Civil Rights & Title IX Office during the academic year.”
In an interview with The Occidental, Fulcher said that the sexual misconduct statistics in the Civil Rights & Title IX Report were mostly standard with annual trends, with the exception of a spike in reports during April. She also said that a spike in reports during August is fairly normal because students often report incidents that occurred over summer break off campus.
“[A spike in] August in typical. But it wasn’t about stuff that happened in August. Any time students come back to campus, either from summer break, from winter break, from spring break, we tend to see an increase,” Fulcher said. “April, I would say, was an anomaly.”
Fulcher said that the independent report from the Civil Rights & Title IX Office is an attempt to clarify the College’s policies and options for victims of sexual misconduct.
“I hope people read [the Civil Rights & Title IX report],” Fulcher said. “I do think it’s an important effort that our office has undertaken in recent years to continually promote transparency of what happens in the office, to try to demystify what our office does.”
The Civil Rights & Title IX Report also records data on how reports get resolved. According to Fulcher, the majority of sexual misconduct reports never get to a resolution by the complainant’s request because students don’t want to go through the hassle of a disciplinary resolution.
“A lot of times students aren’t interested in pursuing a disciplinary process either because they don’t want the other person disciplined or it’s an onerous process and would take too much of their time and energy,” Fulcher said.
Lizzy Denny, Occidental’s Project SAFE Director, said the lack of resolutions in the Civil Rights & Title IX Report may be because survivors of sexual misconduct often deal with trauma in ways that don’t have to result in any legal action or resolution.
“Sometimes folks, the way that we process trauma, sometimes it’s enough to just be able to process it and make a report, but not necessarily need to go through an entire process, especially if it’s within a small community,” Denny said. “It’s really important that we completely leave it up to the survivors as to what they want to do.”
Denny also said that Project SAFE aims to provide students with a reliable and confidential space to process trauma that doesn’t have to end in an investigation.
“We’re trying to make it as safe a space as possible for folks to know all of their options to know that you don’t have to go through an investigation,” Denny said.
Denny said that sexual respect, which the Civil Rights & Title IX Report attempts to foster, is essential to developing a safe community.
“Sexual respect, healthy relationships, health boundaries,” Denny said. “I think those are all really important aspects of having a respectful community.”
Contact Noah Kim at nkim4@oxy.edu
