Editor, Daily Nexus

The purpose of the Clery Report is to warn students and potential students about the crime rates associated with a given school. It was named after a murdered student, Jeanne Clery. Neither she nor her parents were aware of the dangers at the school she was attending. Her parents were not aware of the risk, because the school actively concealed the actual crime statistics for the school.

UCSB issued a false and misleading Clery Report (for the umpteenth year), and just cannot seem to figure out how it happened — again. If the school was to be honest, the only thing that UCSB officials are scratching their heads about is it how to keep covering up crime at UCSB.

Thedarksideofucsb.com has been attempting to get the administration to come clean on the crime stats for years. The UCSB administration seems pathologically unable to report the actual crime numbers. While the 2007 UCSB Clery report is an embarrassing joke, let’s hope that the feds will not find it funny. The school could lose federal funds and be fined if UCSB is found to be (how should I put this delicately?) dissembling. In addition to not providing all the numbers in their report, officials “developed” a new reporting category — this, they think, makes it more difficult to do year-over-year comparisons.

In what can only be attributed to the tortured logic gained by having spent too much time at UCSB, Barbra Ortiz, a UCSB spokesperson, is quoted in the Nexus saying, “The statistics seemed inconsistent with past years. It does look a little strange.”

Inconsistent? A little strange? A homeless guy on the street in I.V. could look at the report and tell that it is “inconsistent.” Why did the school publish such a piece of rubbish? The report, which was released last month, was for 2007. The administration had almost a year to compile the stats — stats that are reported to the school on a daily basis.

Even a quick read of Benjamin Gottlieb’s Nexus article dated Oct. 23, 2008 exposes everyone who is quoted as an absolute weasel. Not one of them offered the truth. Not one of had the guts to make the actual crime stats public — and they all have them. They all sounded like people who have bought into the UCSB ethos of “don’t rat, don’t tell.”