How many crimes did school faculty do in school in 20th century and 21st century

Checked on January 9, 2026
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Executive summary

The available federal and scholarly reporting does not provide a comprehensive count of crimes committed by school faculty "in school" across the entire 20th and 21st centuries, so a single numeric answer cannot be responsibly supplied from the sources provided [1] [2]. National datasets and academic studies instead report on on-campus crimes overall (which include students, faculty, staff, and the public) and on trends in school victimization, leaving the specific subset of faculty-offender incidents under‑specified in the record cited here [1] [2] [3].

1. What the major federal data collect — and what they omit

Federal reporting frameworks such as the Clery Act data collected in the Campus Safety and Security Survey and the NCES Condition of Education record on school crime report counts of on-campus criminal incidents and explicitly include incidents “involving students, faculty, staff, and the general public,” but they aggregate offenders and do not publish a consistent historical series isolating crimes committed by faculty inside school buildings for the 20th and 21st centuries in the sources provided [1] [2]. The FBI’s Crime in Schools and Colleges publications aim to generate reliable law‑enforcement statistics but the publicly referenced summaries here likewise focus on incidents by location and victimization rates rather than a clear faculty‑perpetrator time series [4] [5].

2. What the available numbers can tell about recent campus crime volume

A recent federal snapshot shows that in calendar year 2021, postsecondary institutions reported 23,400 criminal incidents of seven Clery‑reportable types — translating to about 16.9 on‑campus crimes per 10,000 full‑time‑equivalent students — but that total is an institution‑reported count that mixes offender categories and cannot be parsed into a count of faculty‑committed offenses from the cited summary [1]. NCES and related fast‑facts explicitly warn that underreporting and the aggregation of different actor categories limit how precisely one can attribute incidents to faculty versus students or outsiders [2].

3. Scholarly studies and twentieth‑century work do not fill the gap

Historical criminological treatments of school disturbance and school security across the twentieth century—such as summaries and studies by Crews cited in academic collections—examine trends in school disruptions, security measures, and student victimization but do not furnish a comprehensive tally of crimes committed by faculty on campus over the century in the materials provided here [6] [7] [8]. Secondary analyses emphasize overall growth in some categories of crime mid‑to‑late 20th century and decline in victimization since the 1990s for students and teachers, but they stop short of quantifying faculty‑as‑offender counts across decades [3] [9].

4. Why the question is hard to answer with authoritative precision

Three structural problems limit a straight numeric reply from these sources: reporting systems often aggregate offender roles; legal and institutional reporting practices (Clery, NCES, local UCR/NIBRS) vary by era and by institution; and underreporting—especially for sensitive incidents involving staff—means documented counts will understate actual occurrence even where disaggregation exists [1] [2] [5]. High‑profile policymaking and advocacy attention (e.g., on mass shootings, campus safety technology, or concealed carry arguments) can skew what gets measured and publicized toward certain violent event types rather than systematic cataloging of staff criminality [10] [11] [12].

5. Balanced conclusion and next steps for a precise tally

From the provided reporting it is not possible to state how many crimes school faculty committed inside schools across the 20th and 21st centuries because federal and scholarly datasets cited aggregate actors or focus on victimization trends rather than producing a validated historical count of faculty offenders [1] [2] [6]. A rigorous attempt to produce the requested numbers would require targeted extraction from incident‑level Clery/NIBRS records, archival law‑enforcement arrest logs disaggregated by offender occupation, and careful attention to changes in reporting law and practices over time; those primary datasets and an explicit methodology are not contained in the sources supplied [4] [5].

Want to dive deeper?
How can researchers use Clery Act, NIBRS, and NCES data together to identify crimes committed by faculty on college campuses?
What peer‑reviewed studies have quantified staff or faculty criminal convictions in K‑12 schools since 1950?
How do reporting practices and legal definitions of campus jurisdiction affect counts of faculty‑committed crimes in school statistics?