Five CUNY colleges — including the famed John Jay College of Criminal Justice — failed to report 73 percent of the felonies that occurred on their campuses, a bombshell state audit has revealed.
The five campuses — John Jay, Queens, Baruch, Hunter and Medgar Evers — didn’t report 78 out of the total 107 serious crimes that occurred during 2006 and 2007, said the audit by the State Comptroller’s Office. By federal law, the schools are supposed to report the total crime statistics on their Web sites for students.
The unreported crimes included 42 burglaries, six assaults and one hate crime.
One of the most surprising offenders was John Jay, which failed to report 19 of its 20 felonies. It also was criticized for keeping two sets of crime logs, one created two weeks before auditors arrived.
Students were shocked.
“I think it’s unethical. It’s like if there’s a crime in your neighborhood, you want to know what’s going on,” said Deana Kelley, 21, a John Jay sophomore.
Her friend Juliana Velazquez, 28, a grad student, added, “It’s shocking to hear you attend a criminal-justice school and there’s still crime.”
But Robert Pignatello, a senior John Jay vice president who oversees public safety, said the college “absolutely” did not underreport crime to make the campus seem safer than it is.
One problem, he said, is that some of the crimes the auditors used for comparison were reported to the police and not the college, while others occurred off campus.
“The safety of our students is of paramount importance,” he said. “We are a very safe campus. The incidents of crime are very low.”
CUNY spokesman Michael Arena said that when the university learned of the audit’s preliminary findings, it immediately convened a two-day training session for its colleges’ security directors.
Under the federal Clery Act, colleges and universities receiving federal funds are required to prepare and publish on their Web sites an Annual Safety Report (ASR) that contains crime statistics.
The schools are also supposed to send their ASRs to the federal Education Department, which posts them on a Web site so prospective students can compare crime levels at different campuses.
In doing their report — which was obtained exclusively by The Post — the state auditors compared the ASRs with crimes reported to the police.
Of the other four colleges, Queens failed to report 28 of 34 incidents, Baruch 18 of 19, Hunter 11 of 25 — including six aggravated assaults — and Medgar Evers 2 of 9, including a hate crime.