Crimes reported at U. rise

The number of crimes reported to University Police during 1992 was higher than in previous years, Commissioner John Kuprevich said last night. Kuprevich said that four rapes in campus buildings were reported between August of 1991 and July of 1992. This is one more than the year before in the same time frame, and four more than two years before. Non-violent crimes -- including burglary and car theft -- also went up in 1992, although the numbers have fluctuated in the past three years, Kuprevich said. Aggravated assaults remained the same -- seven -- from August 1990 to July 1992. He added that the University has not seen any murder cases in the past three years. Kuprevich said that many of the rape cases listed were reported to University Victim Support Services, rather than directly to University Police. For these reports, there is no official investigation. "The numbers of confidential reports, the ones that went to victim support, has risen in the past two years," Kuprevich said. "If we are truly interested in the number, I think the numbers help us understand that the situation truly is that one in four women are raped and one in 10 report." "We are trying to get more people to report them," he added. It is difficult to compare these numbers to other schools' crime rates, because each school has a separate system of crime reporting, Kuprevich said. The federal government has decreed that crimes should be regarded as campus crimes only if they occur inside campus-owned buildings, Kuprevich explained. "You have two University buildings on a sidewalk," Kuprevich said. "And someone gets out of one to go into the building next door. If a crime happens on the sidewalk, it is considered a community crime, a municipal crime." But the University does not use this system, Kuprevich said. Instead, it categorizes all crimes as campus crimes if they occur anywhere between the area of the Schukyll River and 43rd and Baltimore to Market streets. The rise in numbers also indicate that more people are reporting crimes, Kuprevich said, due to trust in the police or some sort of "phenomena." "This community is more interested in telling us what's happening around us . . . The increase in number of incidents reported occurring on campus . . . may be a reporting phenomena," Kuprevich said. Another reason the numbers are higher is that University Police count reports given to the Philadelphia Police. "Even when Philly responds to an incident, we collect that data to talk about what's going on in our community," Kuprevich said Staff writer Jordana Horn contributed to this article.

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