Category: Pennsylvania News

This story was produced by the State College regional bureau of Spotlight PA, an independent, nonpartisan newsroom dedicated to investigative and public-service journalism for Pennsylvania. Sign up for our north-central Pa. newsletter, Talk of the Town, at spotlightpa.org/newsletters/talkofthetown.

Over the span of nearly a decade, the State College Police Department underreported hundreds of rapes in the central Pennsylvania community, leading to highly inaccurate publicly reported crime statistics, Spotlight PA has learned.

From 2013 to 2021, State College police reported a total of 67 rapes in crime submissions to Pennsylvania State Police, when in fact there had been 321 — a 254-case difference — according to a 10-month Spotlight PA investigation.

Those missing cases were instead classified as sex offenses, a category with lower penalties and one that is treated with less urgency by law enforcement. In response to Spotlight PA, the department conceded it had been using an outdated definition of rape until late 2022 — despite the federal government announcing a change to it in 2012, and that update being subsequently implemented by thousands of police agencies across the U.S. in 2013.

Under the old definition, “a vast array of violent, degrading, abusive sexual assaults were excluded from the data that are used to inform the public about the prevalence of rape,” said Lila Slovak, director of the Women’s Law Project’s Philadelphia office.

Crime statistics in a place like State College, nicknamed “Happy Valley,” are particularly important because it is a college town. Most Pennsylvania State University students live off campus, and federal law requires the school to report only crimes that occur on its premises, on its property, and in public places right next to it.

State College Police Chief John Gardner told Spotlight PA that he was not aware until 2022 that the FBI had updated its definition of rape. He learned when a department records supervisor that year completed a training and implemented the change. Gardner’s predecessor, Tom King, who retired from the department in 2016, said he learned about the incorrect reporting only when contacted by Spotlight PA this summer.

But the department had never acknowledged the longstanding error or disclosed it to the public until approached by Spotlight PA about potential data discrepancies. The department calculated the number of affected cases after Spotlight PA requested a review.

“The inaccurate reporting was not done intentionally,” said Gardner, who is retiring at the end of this year. “The minute we found out about it, we made the correction, and we’re open to sitting down and talking to you about it. We owned it.”

“We want to make this community safe and want people who live here to feel safe,” he said.

Pennsylvania State Police share crime statistics from local departments, including State College, with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, known as UCR. Those figures influence numerous aspects of life in a community and help governments decide where to deploy resources and direct public funds.

Criminologist Eli B. Silverman, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said accurate data are also key to good policing and maintaining trust with the community.

“When crime statistics lose their credibility, the public loses confidence in the police and is less inclined to report crime,” Silverman said. “This, in turn, further diminishes the effectiveness of [a] police organization.”

Over the course of Spotlight PA’s investigation, the newsroom found other potential issues with the department’s handling of reported rapes.

For years, rape cases were habitually described as “assaults” in internal police records, Spotlight PA found. The newsroom also questioned whether factors other than the new definition made previous rape numbers appear low, especially as top officials in the department did not seem clear on how crime reporting works, and at times offered confusing or incorrect information.

Additionally, Spotlight PA identified a case in which two victims reported rapes and the police recorded only one. One police official told reporters that rapes are counted by incident, not by victim — going against well-established FBI rules and indicating a violation separate from underreporting.

Police appear to be “trying to minimize the extent of sexual assault in State College,” Cassia Spohn, a criminologist and professor at Arizona State University, told Spotlight PA. “Doing so can produce a false sense of security among potential victims, leading eventually to an increase in victimization and a decline in public safety.”

Before this investigation was published, Spotlight PA sent a detailed list of findings to police officials and State College borough.

In response, the department offered a joint statement from Gardner, King, longtime State College Borough Manager Tom Fountaine, and State College assistant police chief Matthew Wilson, expressing “a great level of dissatisfaction.”

“The information presented appears to be more representative of an op-ed article than an objective reporting piece. The information you provided for our review is largely misleading and omits perspectives from community stakeholders,” the statement said in part. Read the full response here.

‘I don’t recall’

For more than 80 years, the FBI defined rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” That meant only forced attacks involving penetration of the vagina by a penis were considered rape.

This left out things like forced oral or anal sex, and sex acts that were committed against someone’s will but without force. Attacks on men or boys were also not counted.

That longstanding definition was “narrow, outmoded and steeped in gender-based stereotypes,” the Women’s Law Project wrote in a 2001 letter to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller.

In 2012, the FBI announced it would broaden its definition of rape to “ensure justice for those whose lives have been devastated by sexual violence,” then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said at the time.

“This new, more inclusive definition will provide us with a more accurate understanding of the scope and volume of these crimes,” Holder added.

Leading national organizations for police and sheriffs backed the change, as did women’s organizations and anti-rape groups.

Under the new definition, rape is: “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

John Derbas, a former deputy assistant director of the FBI, told Spotlight PA that by 2015, 15,000 law enforcement agencies across the nation had adopted the reform.

David Hendler, who oversees records at the Abington Township Police Department in Montgomery County, said both he and his predecessor knew about the change when he started working in the department in 2013. Officers talked about it among themselves, he told Spotlight PA.

“Every cop I knew knew about it,” Hendler said.

Yet King, who led State College police from 1993 to 2016, said word never reached him. He was not aware that State College police were incorrectly reporting rapes until Spotlight PA contacted him this summer, he said.

“I don’t recall it. In 2025, as we sit here talking about it today, I don’t recall,” King said in an August interview. He questioned who within the department might have been contacted by Pennsylvania State Police, which ensures that law enforcement agencies across the state submit crime data that go to the FBI.

“Whoever they addressed it to, I don’t recall ever seeing any direction from the State Police to make a change, or being aware that it was changed,” said King, who became the interim police chief in neighboring Ferguson Township in October. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t. We’re talking about 12 years ago.”

A spokesperson for Pennsylvania State Police told Spotlight PA the agency alerted local police departments about the change. A December 2012 notification “outlined the new definition and instructed agencies to report offenses accordingly, starting in January 2013,” Myles Snyder wrote in an email. After that, “the responsibility for ensuring correct and timely reporting lies solely with contributing agencies,” he added.

A five-paragraph notice was sent via the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Assistance Network, or CLEAN, a platform police departments use to communicate with other agencies, on Dec. 27, 2012 — less than a week before the new requirement took effect, according to a document obtained through a public records request.

State police have “the highest level of confidence in this communication system,” Snyder said when asked if the notice reliably reached all of the roughly 2,000 local law enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania.

Agencies like the State College Police Department have to acknowledge receipt of every message sent over CLEAN, he said. It is not optional, and “lives depend on it.” The messages are kept for 10 years, Snyder told Spotlight PA, so Pennsylvania State Police cannot verify who, if anyone, confirmed receipt of the notice.

In 2014, statewide data showed a 12% increase in rapes for the 2013 annual report, Snyder said. That indicated that submitting agencies were recognizing and using the new offense classification rule.

No one from Pennsylvania State Police or the FBI told the department it had missed the memo and was reporting erroneously, Gardner said in a joint interview with King and Fountaine.

State police are legally bound to collect data from local departments, and those agencies must use the FBI’s definitions for crimes. The agency checks on two things for UCR compliance: that a police department submits data, and that the numbers add up, Snyder said.

Between 2016 and 2023, Pennsylvania State Police logged 65 instances of local departments being out of compliance. The agency did not provide information on why, but two chiefs told Spotlight PA it was because their departments did not submit any numbers. The violations, which came with the threat of losing some state grant funding, were deemed fixed by state police as long as the departments began filing monthly.

“Submitting agencies are solely responsible for the accuracy of their information,” Snyder told Spotlight PA.

Both State College police chiefs told Spotlight PA that they did not intentionally disregard the FBI mandate to report rapes accurately. “I know with absolute confidence that had I received that notification … we would have made the change,” King said.

A late revelation

The department, with 53 sworn officers today, serves over 57,000 residents in State College and neighboring College and Harris Townships. Its jurisdiction borders Penn State’s University Park campus, which has its own police force. However, many of the university’s nearly 49,000 undergraduate students live, work, and recreate off campus — so State College police regularly interact with students.

During a typical academic year, 75% of rape victims are Penn State students, Lt. Chad Hamilton, State College police detective supervisor, said.

For years, rape numbers reported by State College police were consistently low, hovering in single digits for the most part. When the department reported its 2021 crime statistics to UCR, police claimed that there was not a single rape that year.

It turns out that there were at least 30.

But instead of rapes, those cases were submitted to the Uniform Crime Reporting system as sex offenses. These are considered a “part two” crime, a category that the FBI collects less information about and rarely mentions in its regular announcements about crime in America.

In police speak, part one crimes are the most severe offenses: homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, human trafficking. They are high priorities for law enforcement, often bringing with them pressure to make arrests and clear cases. These are considered indicators of the level of crime occurring in the country, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook.

Rape cases should never go into part two crime counts, Spohn, the criminologist, told Spotlight PA. Sex crimes under the part two category include acts like fondling or indecent exposure, she said. The category does not include sex crimes involving penetration. “The UCR handbook is pretty specific,” she said.

But by its own admission, the State College Police Department did exactly that — incorrectly reporting at least 254 part one crimes as part two ones.

“It’s not like we weren’t reporting,” Wilson told Spotlight PA in a February interview. He said the police department was not calling these incidents rapes, but it was calling them sexual offenses. “I don’t see it as a huge deal,” he said.

Three years ago, a longtime staffer, Alecia Schaeffer, took over as records supervisor. That is the position ultimately responsible for reviewing each incident, ensuring the coding follows the rules, and submitting monthly reports to the state.

Schaeffer — who was trained and certified on Uniform Crime Reporting in 2002 — got a refresher course in December 2022, bringing back with her an urgency to update the police department’s practice.

Spotlight PA repeatedly requested to interview Schaeffer. The borough and department refused, saying they generally do not make staff available to the media.

Gardner said he was in the conversation following Schaeffer’s training but remembered “very, very little” about it — “other than the fact that she learned through training that … all these offenses were to be coded as rapes,” he said.

Fountaine, who oversees State College police in his role as borough manager, said he became aware of this change when the department was first contacted by Spotlight PA.

Experts told Spotlight PA that the way rapes are labeled matters for victims and communities.

“It’s not just about how it shows up in statistics, it’s about how people think about what’s happened to them, how other people think about what’s happened to them, how the community thinks about what’s happened to them,” said Anne Ard, former executive director of Centre Safe, a State College-based organization that supports survivors of sexual violence.

Department officials say the way the cases were coded had no impact on how police handled them.

However, between 2013 and 2023, State College police’s rate of arrests for rape was double that for sex offenses, according to a Spotlight PA analysis of data submitted to UCR.

State College police said that driving any investigation is the strength of evidence, the victim’s wishes, and input from the district attorney’s office.

“It doesn’t matter to us what is coded. It’s going to be thoroughly investigated to the best of our abilities,” Wilson told Spotlight PA.

Other potential issues

King, the department’s former police chief, told Spotlight PA that incidents of sexual violence were “very, very, very high priorities for the department.”

King said that the department applied for grant funding to address sexual violence, and that it created specialized investigative units and response teams as far back as 2006. Officials communicated with the public “over and over again” on the significance placed on these crimes, King said.

But throughout its investigation, Spotlight PA identified other potential issues with the way State College police handled rape cases.

One issue is the accuracy of State College’s rape numbers unrelated to the definition change.

Because the new rape definition was broader, the FBI anticipated a rise in reported rape figures nationwide — as much as 41.7% in 2013, it said. In State College, however, it saw a 222% increase for 2013. Between the years 2013 and 2020, the revised definition produced an average annual increase of 384%.

Spotlight PA asked the department about the discrepancy, whether factors other than the new definition affected the low 2013 rape count, and if the inconsistency raised concerns about previous UCR reporting.

Both chiefs emphatically defended those figures.

Spotlight PA asked the department to review cases between 2005 and 2012 to ensure compliance with the FBI’s legacy rape definition; to allow the newsroom to do so; or to make the records supervisor available for either an interview or written responses to questions. Officials declined.

Without an independent review of investigative files and records, questions about the department’s crime reporting accuracy could not be fully answered.

But one case sheds light on the long-term consequences of the department’s errors.

‘I was raped’

Standing in a parking lot by her dorm building on a summer night in 2019, Lexi Tingley, barely a freshman at Penn State, texted her mother. It was 2:44 a.m., and the worst had happened.

“Mommy.”

“I think I need to go to the ER.”

“I was raped.”

“I’m scared.”

Tingley’s mother knew the lot; she had dropped her daughter off there recently for summer sessions. Frantically, she drove Tingley and her friend, who had also been raped that night, to Mount Nittany Medical Center. Tingley was examined, was tested for sexually transmitted diseases, and met with a State College police officer at the hospital.

Tingley’s statements became the experiences of “victim 1” in the police report. Her friend, Hanna Friedenberger, was victim 3 in the report. Another friend, victim 2, witnessed the crimes and had a panic attack, but was not assaulted. (Both Tingley and Friedenberger spoke to Spotlight PA and agreed to be named.)

Both Tingley and Friedenberger said they were raped at the Legend, a student rental complex three blocks from campus. Police took both their statements.

But State College police records show that one of the rapes was not accounted for.

The department keeps an internal crime log, a set of records detailing every call it responded to in the last 20 years. It’s the first draft of crime statistics that would be reviewed, cataloged, and corrected if needed before submitting to the Uniform Crime Reporting system. The log contained one rape for the day that Tingley and Friedenberger were attacked.

Wilson, the assistant police chief, said in an August email that rape cases are counted per incident, not per victim — although FBI rules say cases should be counted by the number of victims. Wilson, whose responsibilities include overseeing the department’s records operations, did not respond when Spotlight PA sought additional clarity. Wilson will become the police chief for State College’s neighboring Ferguson Township in 2026.

UCR data for that month, August 2019, show three rapes reported by State College police.

However, Gardner said in an email that there were two other rapes that month that were not related to Tingley and Friedenberger. That means the department should have reported four rapes to UCR.

In an interview, Gardner told Spotlight PA that the UCR data for August 2019 included both Tingley and Friedenberger. “You report victims to UCR, OK, we don’t do it by incident. Do you understand?”

Gardner insisted the department handled the case properly, and said he did not know the source of the discrepancy.

There is another notable problem.

The internal crime log reviewed by Spotlight PA contained four pieces of information for this incident. The time the call was received was 3:49:44 a.m. on Aug. 1, 2019. The outcome of the incident, called disposition, was “ECA” or exceptional clearance of an adult — commonly used for when prosecutors declined to file charges, as happened in the women’s case.

Additionally, there was a description and a code.

When State College police officers file incident reports, they describe the calls they respond to — for example, “burglary” or “traffic stop.” The actual criminal violation that resulted would be recorded as a four-digit code. In State College’s system, for example, 0210 is code for forcible rape. Coders in the records department — not officers — are responsible for doing that.

In Tingley and Friedenberger’s case, the report was coded 0210, referring to rape. But the description — crucial for any layperson not familiar with State College police coding to understand the nature of a case — said “assault earlier.”

For at least a quarter-century, State College police have held daily media briefings where reporters were handed daily law incident summaries, or what the department calls a press log. These documents include the description, but not the case code, of each incident.

Between 2005 and 2021, State College police in these logs described 110 cases that were ultimately classified as rapes as “assault” or “assault earlier.” That is four out of every five rapes recorded by the department during that period.

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Asked how residents or reporters who attended these briefings would be able to distinguish rape cases from physical fights because they were lumped together under the title of “assault,” Gardner said the officers in charge would note if any case was sexual in nature.

“It’s serious,” he said an officer in that situation would say, arguing the vagueness protected victims’ privacy.

That approach leaves the quality of State College crime data to chance.

This happened when the department provided its 2009 crime log to an open-records requester this February, which was later posted online. The requester asked for the type of crime for each incident and received the crime log with the incident description listed but not the numeric case code.

No rapes were listed in the 161 pages that State College turned over. If incident codes had been included, the log would show two cases of rape that year.

Gardner serves as the police department’s Right-to-Know officer. He told Spotlight PA that the code was not given to the requester because the person did not specifically ask for it.

Spotlight PA submitted a Right-to-Know request asking for the same information as the original requester, and did not ask for the 4-digit code. But police provided both the data and the code to the newsroom.

It is impossible to determine if Tingley and Friedenberger’s case was unique. The newsroom cannot determine if undercounting rape victims by using the incident count was an isolated incident or a more prevalent problem. State law does not allow public access to police investigative files, and State College police refused Spotlight PA’s request to review them.

Tingley and Friedenberger, already heartbroken over the outcome of their case, would not find out until contacted by Spotlight PA that State College police had undercounted their rapes in public crime data.

Tingley, now 24, said it is hard to separate the rape and what followed. The treatment she received from law enforcement — a “false promising,” as she called it — was “equally painful” as the worst thing that has happened to her.

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