UBC Campus Security’s website contains charts with the number of sexual assaults reported on campus to Campus Security and the university's RCMP detachment — but the term “on campus” might not be as large as it suggests.
According to UBC RCMP Sgt. Drew Grainger, Campus Security's statistics only include incidents that occur on university property, and do not include property within the boundaries of Pacific Spirit Park, the residential areas of the University Endowment Lands or the University Neighbourhood Association.
“The UBC RCMP is responsible for policing the entire jurisdiction of the University Endowment Lands, which includes Pacific Spirit Park,” said Sgt. Grainger in an emailed statement. “All the non-Campus sexual assault incidents do not reflect in the Campus Security report. As you can imagine, the RCMP do regularly investigate several more sexual assault complaints outside of the University Campus.”
The Ubyssey obtained RCMP sexual assault statistics through a freedom of information request. The discrepancy between those statistics and Campus Security's varied widely from year to year, which is to be expected when the RCMP is patrolling a much larger area than Campus Security.
But in certain years, the number of sexual assaults reported by Campus Security is larger than the amount reported by the RCMP — who patrol an area that includes the area patrolled by Campus Security. When asked to explain the cases in which Campus Security numbers were higher than the RCMP's, Sgt. Grainger said that figuring out the source of the issue would require delving into years of files.
“Unfortunately, I do not have the time myself to do that,” he said in an email to The Ubyssey, “and we do not have an analyst at the Detachment to do that kind of research.”
UBC previously came under fire for its sexual assault statistics in 2015, when a CBC article revealed that “the number of sexual assault reports received by the University of British Columbia between 2009 and 2013 is less than a quarter of the number received by the RCMP detachment on the UBC campus during the same time period.”
At the time, the statistics that UBC gave to the CBC did not include any statistics from the campus RCMP detachment, meaning that only those reported to Campus Security directly were included. According to Sergeant Grainger, the RCMP has been sharing their specific numbers with Campus Security “over the last 18 months or so.”
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