What can the crime logs of the nation’s number one party school, The University of Iowa, reveal about college-age drug and alcohol use in 2014?

If you want to better understand the nature of illicit drug and alcohol use on American college campuses, you need to check the data. The most comprehensive data source available – covering the most colleges across the most measures of crime – is held by the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE). It’s called the OPE Campus Safety and Security Statistics database and every year all colleges that receive Title IV funding from the government, no matter how renowned or ramshackle they are, report what arrests have been made on and around their campuses and residence halls so that the OPE can update its records accordingly.

The database is very far-reaching, with figures for nearly 10,000 different institutions dating back more than a decade. However, it doesn’t go into very much detail about each one. For instance, it records the number of drug arrests each college has, but not the specific drugs people are arrested for possessing. Nor does it specify whether arrestees are students of the college or non-students who are merely passing through the campus when apprehended by its police. The location of arrests is also quite vague, being dichotomized into either on-campus or off-campus. So too is the time at which arrests take place: In fact, there is no specific time point given, only that they occurred at some point during the 12 months that are being reported. These limits mean that once you’ve calculated the per capita rates of arrests and presented them in some pretty-looking tables, you’re left staring at a wall. Further analysis and a deeper understanding of drug and alcohol use on college campuses isn’t possible, simply because the OPE data is too vague.

To go deeper, one would need to find public records that are much more specific, detailing exactly when arrests took place, the precise charges, who was being arrested, where they lived, and perhaps even their ages. Unfortunately, not many colleges publish crime statistics detailed enough to meet our proposed research requirements. One that does is The University of Iowa, which is a happy accident, because it also happens to be the number one party college in America. In other words, it is the ideal campus to scrutinize if we want to move beyond the confines of the OPE’s simplistic numbers.

Using The University of Iowa’s data, we can for the first time see where arrests took place, who was nabbed, what they did, where they were living at the time, and how old they were – everything we require to potentially learn more about the culture of crime on college campuses.

The University of Iowa, a.k.a. Party College Numero Uno

Before we put The University of Iowa’s crime stats under the microscope, it’s worth explaining why it bears such scrutiny, apart from the fact that its crime logs are so detailed. After all, there are thousands of other schools out there, many with much higher drug and alcohol arrest rates than UI. What they don’t have, however, is the dubious accolade of being named 2014’s number one party school by the Princeton Review, which publishes annual top 20 rankings based on survey responses from more than 120,000 college students.

This year, UI topped the Party School list, having placed second in 2013, fourth in 2012, and ninth in 2011. It also ranked number one this year in “lots of hard liquor,” number four in “students study the least,” number four in “lots of beer,” number seven in “students pack the stadiums,” and number 18 in “lots of Greek life.” In short then, UI has a reputation worthy of inspection. Some of its students would appear to agree.

Mapping Drug and Alcohol Arrests at The University of Iowa

The last comment above, made by a college student and found with the others on College Prowler, alludes to the consequences of drug-taking, under-age drinking, and binge-drinking at UI. The map below shows more than a thousand of such consequences. Each dot is a drink- or drug-related arrest made in 2013 by UI’s police. They have been coded and geographically plotted according to the location information found in UI’s 2013 crime log.

Even without previous knowledge of UI’s physical layout, it’s easy to see that there were quite a few arrests made in 2013 in and around its campus. In fact, there were 1,314 arrests, consisting of 1,820 charges (sometimes arrests entail multiple charges, i.e. the shameful combination of, say, public intoxication and public urination). For each recorded drug-related charge, there were five alcohol-related ones and, although not all arrests involved drinking or drugs, most of them did (77%, to be precise).

Although UI’s crime log is quite detailed, it doesn’t specifically state the enrollment status of those arrested. Despite this, UI’s annual crime report does state that 46% of arrestees in 2013 were UI students. This equates to many of those listed in the 2013 crime log being non-students. A few examples obviously weren’t, like those whose ages are listed as being over 40, 50, and even 70. To filter out a lot of these types of non-students, we only mapped and graphed arrests of people aged 18 to 25 (the age-range of three quarters of the UI student body). That doesn’t guarantee, however, that all of the young people arrested (and whose arrests are shown as dots on the map above) were UI students. The ones who most likely were students can be seen in the drug-related arrests (shown as blue dots), because almost all of them are clustered around UI’s residence halls on either side of the river. Even Mayflower Hall, shown right at the top of the map, has a considerable number of drug-related arrests, despite being quite far out from the main campus boundary.