Crime and Safety in Schools and on College Campuses

The annual Report on Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2022, jointly produced by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) at IES and the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice, highlights new data on school shooting and deaths, student victimization, teacher safety and reports of disruption, and on-campus postsecondary criminal incidents, including hate crimes. New data in the indicators linked above reflect events and experiences between 2020 and 2022. This period coincides with in-person learning disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning that students may have spent less time at school and had less in-person interaction with their teachers and other students than in previous years. Thus, readers are encouraged to interpret data since 2020 in the context of these pandemic-related modifications. In general, these indicators with data available since the pandemic show fewer incidents or lower victimization rates during the pandemic than just prior to the pandemic. One exception is K­–12 school shootings, which are broadly defined to include all incidents in which “a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week.” (For more detail on these data, please see the full indicator.) Specifically, key findings from updated indicators include: Between 2000–01 and 2020–21, the number of K–12 school shootings with casualties ranged from 11 to 93 per year. In 2021–22, the number of K–12 school shootings with casualties (188) was more than twice as high as the next highest number of documented shootings (93), which was documented the year before. Active shooter incidents represent a subset of the possible shooting incidents that occur at schools. The most recent active shooter data in this report are for 2021. From 2000 to 2021, there have been 46 active shooter incidents documented in elementary and secondary schools, including two incidents in 2021. At postsecondary institutions, there have been 18 active shooter incidents documented from 2000 to 2021, with none documented in 2021. The nonfatal criminal victimization rate for students ages 12–18 at school in 2019 was not significantly different than the rate in 2010. From 2019 to 2021, the rate at school decreased from 30 to 7 victimizations per 1,000 students. Lower percentages of public school teachers in 2020–21 than in 2011–12 reported being threatened with injury by a student from their school (6 vs. 10 percent) and being physically attacked by a student from their school (4 vs. 6 percent). A lower percentage of public school teachers in 2020–21 than in 2011–12 agreed that student misbehavior interfered with their teaching (32 vs. 41 percent). The overall rate of crimes reported on campuses of postsecondary institutions per 10,000 FTE students enrolled in 2020 (15.0) was 20 percent lower than in 2019 (18.8) and 28 percent lower than in 2010 (20.9). The number of reported on-campus hate crimes in 2020 (571 incidents) was 25 percent lower than in 2019 (759 incidents) and 38 percent lower than in 2010 (928 incidents). Race, sexual orientation, and ethnicity were the three most frequently reported categories of bias motivating these hate crimes.