Within the last few years, San Luis Obispo accumulated multiple cases of sexual harassment and assault, including some on Cal Poly's campus.
As of this school year, there have been two sexual assault cases associated with the university including a break into a Poly Canyon Village apartment in September and an alleged sexual assault and kidnapping by a Cal Poly custodian.
An ongoing sexual assault case involving two business owners Nate Abate and Julian Contreras had also taken the city aback after six women had testified in court against them. Abate has since been sentenced to eight years in state prison while Contreras remains at large after fleeing out of the country.
While San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly have reported these occurrences recently, data obtained from the Megan's Law website outline the number of registered sex offenders within a 2-mile radius around each Cal State university.
The graphic below combines data from the Megan's Law and Clery Act reports for each Cal State university. The sum of each campus related crime based on sexual harassment is presented next to each Cal State city's number of registered sex offenders.
The number of registered sex offenders in each college city does not correlate with the number of campus related crimes obtained from each university's Clery Act reports.
Each statistic provides an overview of a Cal State university and its corresponding city's crimes related to sexual harassment and assault.
In relation to the recent reporting of Cal Poly crimes, the university remains a leader among other Cal State schools based on sexual harassment-related crimes.
However, San Luis Obispo is among the Cal State cities with the least amount of sexual offenders within a 2-mile radius of its university.
The crimes chosen from each Cal State Clery Act report for the above graphic include rape, fondling, aggravated assault, domestic violence and stalking.
For Cal Poly specifically, these reported crimes are outlined in the adjacent graphic by year.
Among the five categories of sexual harassment, stalking is the most prevalent crime reported throughout the recorded years.
As enrollment continues to increase for Cal Poly, the total number of crimes related to sexual harassment do as well.
The graphic on the left demonstrates the relationship between the rates of enrollment and crime at Cal Poly. Although the relationship is fairly positive, it still cannot directly determine causality for the two trends.
However, the remaining increase in sexual harassment crimes based on Clery Act reports within Cal Poly raises concerns among the safety and wellbeing of students in the university's campus and residing city.
Note: One potential cause for the low campus-related crime levels in 2021 is the lack of on campus learning due to COVID.