University Chief of Police Barbara O’Connor issued the 11th Crime Alert of the semester after a female student was assaulted in Forbes Hall on Monday.

The numerous Crime Alerts sent out by the Department of Public Safety on campus are published under federal compliance with the 1989 Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Crime Statistics Act.

In addition to publishing an Annual Campus Security Report and maintaining a public crime log of the last 60 days worth of information, the Clery Act requires the University to give timely warning of crimes that represent a threat to the safety of students or employees.

The University uses an e-mail and Short-Message-Service message, or text message, alert system to distribute these alerts to students whenever a threat is still at-large on campus.

One factor that Chief O’Connor pointed out as “unique” was the size and geography of the Urbana-Champaign campus district.

“I do think since folks have the sense that since (the alert system) is so new, since the switch from a paper to an electronic system, and we distribute it to 70,000 people, it gives the perception that crime is up,” O’Connor said. “Most of these things complicate the issue.”

She also pointed out that the University Police alert students of a threatening crime that takes place outside of University property, but still within campus jurisdiction.

“We’ve extended our area because only two Crime Alerts would only have been reported from on University Property,” O’Connor said.

Although both sister campuses of the University system are equipped with the same e-mail and text message alert systems to distribute Crime Alerts, University of Illinois at Springfield Police Department Captain Larry Griffiths said that they have yet to actually utilize the system for an incident on their campus.

“The only time we use our messaging system, that only goes out if its an ongoing threat, or a life or death situation, or say there was an active shooter on campus,” said Griffiths. “Fortunately for us, we’ve never had to use this system,” he said.

For a campus that has a population that barely edges 5,000 students, some of Springfield’s downstate fortune is shared when Champaign-Urbana is compared to the dense urban environment of the University of Illinois at Chicago. While the Chicago campus reported 16 aggravated assaults for 2009, only eight were reported that year in Champaign-Urbana.

UIC News Bureau Director Bill Burton said that their policy for issuing Crime Alerts is very similar to Champaign-Urbana’s.

“Basically, as soon as police are certain a crime has occurred, notifying the campus community will serve public safety, and will not impede an ongoing investigation”, Burton said. “We send a Crime Alert when public safety is served by the issue of the alert.”

O’Connor also said that because of the alerts, students are now paying more attention to safety.

“The whole purpose is to promote transparency,” she said.