National research suggests universities misreport crime in some cases, according to safety experts from the state attorneys general.

In 2008, Fresno State reported 218 criminal offenses. But, that figure may not be representative.

University statistics often draws a muddled picture of on-campus crime because of the different standards for what’s included in crime statistics.

According to a 2008 report on crime statistics released by the United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 324 instances of larceny-theft took place at Fresno State. The university, however, is not required to record this in its federally mandated annual security report.

Annual campus crime reports to the Department of Education are required by all universities and colleges that participate in federal financial aid under the Clery Act, a federal law named for a student murdered at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University in 1986.

Yet, the Clery Act’s exclusion of larcenies serves as a loophole for some schools to misidentify burglaries as larcenies, which may result in a distorted number of campus thefts. The burglary tally is reported to the Department of Education, while the larceny tally is reported separately to the FBI.

Fresno State recorded the highest incidences of burglary and larceny-theft out of the 23 California State University campuses in 2008, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Justice. Only eight other California college campuses, including state colleges, community colleges and University of California campuses, topped Fresno State in incidences of larceny-theft.

The University Police Department crime statistics show that no instances of larceny-theft on campus have taken place. However, 76 counts of burglary were reported in 2008.

Freshman Barbara Shinaver knows the feeling all too well.

While returning to her locker in the new Music Building, the 18-year-old music composition major noticed that her locker door was ajar. Inside, the locker had housed her recently purchased laptop.

“I looked up where I hung my laptop and it was gone,” Shinaver said. “It all happened in the matter of an hour.”

She said that everything inside of her laptop case was stolen including a pair of sunglasses, documents and a metronome for her musical instrument. A report with the university police was filed immediately after, she said.

The university, however, does not consider laptop theft to be burglary. Rather, the nonforcible entry is considered larceny. Under federal law larcenies can include purse snatching, shoplifting, bicycle theft, fraud, embezzlement, identity theft or forgery.

Larcenies occur three to four times more often than burglaries, but some schools report statistics that indicate otherwise, according to the FBI website.

However, multiple state and federal laws that tally crime at universities may not provide an accurate picture of the scope of the problem, critics argue.

The House of Representatives twice voted to categorize larceny as a type of burglary, within the past decade. The Senate, however, passed versions of the bill without the stipulation.

Other crimes have also allegedly been misrepresented in the annual crime reports. Sexual assault, more often than not, leads this category.

At UC Davis last year, university officials alleged that the head of campus anti-violence efforts inflated the number of forcible sexual assaults for three years.

Eight years earlier, the Sacramento Bee revealed that a federal grant application was filed that stated upwards of 700 students at the university were victims of rape or attempted rape each year, all while university officials reported to federal authorities that rapes and assaults on campus were practically nonexistent. In that year, the UC Davis crime report only listed four sexual assaults, but 186 students sought counseling from the campus health services as sexual assault victims, according to investigation from the Sacramento Bee.

John Dussich, a criminology professor who specializes in victomology at Fresno State, said this may not always be the case.

Most universities, he said, report accurately and underreported numbers are often isolated cases. Dussich went on to say that a lot of the underreporting stems from the victim who may be afraid to report the case due to elements of embarrassment, intimidation or emotional investments with the perpetrator.

“There is a lot of suspicion that revolves around this theory,” Dussich said. “Most campuses take tremendous caution in classifying cases as a rape when in reality it may have been an attempted rape.”

The Department of Education has launched investigations into allegations of intentional misreporting at several universities and colleges, including UC Davis, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and West Virginia University. According to reports, officers at WVU filed a lawsuit against supervisors who allegedly retaliated against them after the officers claimed campus burglaries were being misclassified as larcenies on incident reports.

Critics argue that too few penalties for universities that do not comply with Clery Act reporting exist.

Crime data reported by universities, likewise, are not subjected to independent verification by the Department of Education, but violations in reporting in the Clery Act can result in fines.