The University of New Mexico Police Department is changing the way sexual assault crimes are being recorded and tracked down.
Tim Stump, chief communications officer for the UNMPD, said new subcategories have been created to divide the different types of sexual assault that are being reported.
He said there are now two new subcategories: forcible and non-forcible sexual assault. Both are further divided into rape, fondling, incest and statutory rape.
"In any kind of sexual assault there are so many different types of sexual assault," Stump said. "This gives anyone in the public, (anyone) interested in the school, in the media... it gives anyone the knowledge of how they differentiate."
According to a UNM press release, these changes to how sexual assault will be recorded were made permanent by the amended 2015 Annual Security and Fire Safety report that was updated last November.
The change was made by the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistic act, also know as the federal Clery Act, according to the release.
The Clery Act, which requires colleges to report all crimes committed on campus, "originally focused on crime statistics collected by the university police departments," according to the release. "Early on, the Clery Act primarily focused on crime statistics, but over the years, it has become a more extensive and comprehensive report that is now a university-wide effort, requiring input from many campus entities."
The release quoted Clery Act Compliance Officer Rob Burford as saying that the changes are made to improve accuracy and clarity regarding crime on campus.
“Any time that additional scrutiny finds a change in the numbers, we will incorporate those changes into the affected year’s report, so that it reflects as accurately as possible the amount and types of crime on campus," he said in the release.
Along with Burford updating the annual safety reports, Stump said UNMPD is always coming up with new initiatives for combatting sexual assault and crimes on campus.
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"We work very well with a lot of partners on campus to always work towards the survivor or the victim to help them in every way we can," he said. "We meet once a month and discuss what we can do to improve and how we can do our job better"
Stump said UNMPD doesn't want anything to be hidden from the public, especially the students, when it comes to what crimes are happening around them day by day.
"We want everyone to know what is going on here, so in the whole aspect of being transparent this gives us more transparency towards what you're looking at," he said. "This gives people a chance to see what's actually going on not just a perception."
The new sexual assault subcategories are set in place to make the sexual assault crimes happening on campus clear to the public to what the crime actually is, he said, instead of "hearing sexual assault and automatically thinking rape."
Officer Stump said he believes the hope in these new subcategories will open others' eyes to how safe UNM's campus is.
"We want people to see what's going on, that their perception of the school isn't as bad as it might have been. It's been going around that there is a lot of sexual assault here when in reality others perceive a sexual assault as a rape. So there's not as much going on as they perceive there to be," Stump said. "This is a safe campus."
Denicia Aragon is a staff reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo
