What is the Clery Act?

Congress enacted the Clery Act in 1990 to bring transparency to crime on college campuses and campus safety policies. The law requires both public and private universities that receive any federal funding, including student financial aid, to report certain crimes that occur in and around campus, publicly outline their public safety policies, and support victims of violence.

The law is named after Jeanne Clery, a 19 year old freshman at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who was raped and murdered in her dorm room. Her parents said that if they were aware of the school’s crime rate, their daughter wouldn’t have attended this college.

The act is enforced by the United States Department of Education. Institutions who do not comply with The Clery Act can be fined. Campuses must release an Annual Security Report (ASR) to students and employees every year on October 1st. This report must include statistics of campus crime for the previous three calendar years and their actions to improve campus safety.

Institutions are also required to conduct prevention education to students and employees on the crimes mentioned below.

What does the Clery Act mandate?

The Clery Act requires universities and colleges that receive federal funding to:

  1. Disclose information about four categories of crimes:

    • criminal offenses
    • hate crimes
    • Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) offenses
    • arrests and referrals for disciplinary actions

  2. Publish an Annual Security Report on October 1st every year.

  3. Maintain a public crime log that details the nature, date, time, and location of crimes.

    • Campuses must log the crime within two business days of being notified of the offense. This database must be accessible to the public.

  4. Campuses must log crimes that occur on and around campus. If an off-campus spot is associated with the university, that must be reported.

  5. Universities must issue timely warnings to the entire campus if it is notified of a crime or incident that entails a “serious or ongoing threat.”

    • These types of incidents can range from sexual violence or shootings to fires or earthquakes.

  6. Universities must keep the victim's confidentiality.

    • There is no requirement to report identifying information about the victim.

How can I use the Clery Act for my reporting?

The Clery Act mandates a swath of detailed and summary data available for collection. You can request 1 year, 5 years, even 10 years worth of daily crime logs from any institution that receives federal funding—and you can look at public safety trends over time.

However, like any dataset, there’s bound to be misreported crimes.

Since the enactment of this law, many universities have been found as non-compliant. In 2021, the California State Auditor found that only one out of the six California universities that they audited was fully compliant with reporting crimes as required by the Clery Act.

The biggest error the state auditor found was that universities were underreporting crimes, which resulted in timely warnings not being issued to the general public. There were also patterns of overreported crimes and missing crimes. Some schools didn’t publicly detail their campus crime policies.

You don’t know what types of stories can come from looking into your college's compliance with the Clery Act or its daily crime reports. Head over to “Recreate this site” to get started!

Information on this page sourced from The Clery Center and RAINN.org