Content warning: The following discusses topics including sexual assault and violence.
The Suffolk University Police Department released its annual report on crime and fire events Sept. 29, as required by The Jeanne Clery Act of 1990.
This year’s report showed an increase of almost 91% in reported criminal activities on Suffolk’s campus.
The report from this year included the most recent data from 2024, along with previous years data from 2023 and 2022. In 2024 The SUPD saw 21 reported incidents up from 11 in 2023 and just nine in 2022.
The university saw one case of rape on campus, an incident that occurred in the university’s dorms. That is the same as previous years reports. The university saw four cases of dating violence up from just one case in 2023.
Suffolk also saw one hate crime on campus. The SUPD reported it as a case of simple assault related to an individual’s sexual orientation. The assault took place in a dorm according to the report.
There were five cases of aggravated assault on campus last year up from just two cases in 2023. There were two reported burglaries in the dorms in 2024, additionally there were four robberies reported on campus, the first reported since at least before 2021. There were also three motor vehicle thefts reported to the SUPD last year.
There were more arrests made on campus last year than in 2023, arrests on campus doubled from two in 2023 to four in 2024. Three arrests were for drug law violations and one for liquor law violations.
The university also made 117 referrals to other law enforcement agencies in 2024. Two were for illegal weapons possession, five for drug law violations and 110 for liquor law violations. This was down from 124 in 2023 and 126 in 2022 along with 2021.
The university’s crime statistics are not in line with peer institutions in Suffolk’s area of Boston. Suffolk saw far more criminal activity than that of Emerson College, the college that most closely resembles Suffolk’s size and location. Emerson reported only nine criminal activities on its Boston campus in 2024.
The SUPD is in the process of receiving firearms for its officers, a very controversial move on Suffolk’s campus. The SUPD has also seen heavy inclusion in the State’s POST commission reports in previous years.
The SUPD much like other peer institutions in Boston are not equipped to handle the day to day activities of a full law enforcement agency. They are also not held to the same standards as state and municipal police agencies. The SUPD is a private police force that must defer to the Massachusetts State Police and the Boston Police Department in the vast majority of cases.
Under the Cleary Act all universities in the United States are required to include any reports of criminal homicide, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft and arson that occur on its campus.
Suffolk breaks down certain categories of crime such as sexual assault into subcategories, which include rape, fondling, incest and statutory rape. The university police also reported different types of assault in subcategories: domestic violence, dating violence, stalking, robbery and aggravated assault.
The university is required by law to include statistics from the previous three years in each report. The report available to all on the University’s website is downloadable as a PDF.
This year’s report consisted of multiple pages of tables containing all the data required to be in the report by law. These tables, included at the very end of the 133 page document, were pixelated, which resulted in legibility issues.
These legibility issues did not occur in some of the most recent reports put out by the SUPD in recent years. The report covering 2023 released last Sept. did not contain any of these issues in its data sections.
