STATE COLLEGE — The head of a civilian oversight board said the State College Police Department’s misclassification of hundreds of rapes “didn’t make any difference” to how the cases were handled.
Community Oversight Board Chair Ron Madrid made those comments to Borough Council members during a Jan. 12 meeting in response to a 10-month Spotlight PA investigation. The newsroom found the department, which serves the community surrounding Penn State, had erroneously reported 254 cases of rape between 2013 and 2021 as sexual offenses, leading to highly inaccurate publicly reported crime data.
The department had never acknowledged the longstanding error or disclosed it to the public until approached by Spotlight PA about potential data discrepancies.
Experts told Spotlight PA that the way rapes are labeled matters for victims and communities. Local crime data are shared with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, known as UCR. Those figures are an important measure of public safety and help governments decide where to deploy resources and direct public funds.
Madrid, however, focused his public comments on the handling of cases.
“We investigated the anomaly and determined that though some rapes were reported as sexual assaults over a period of time, it did not lessen the vigor, professionalism, and thoroughness of the investigations,” he said.
He also claimed the Spotlight PA investigation did “not paint a complete picture.” A request to explain that comment was not returned by the time of this story’s publication.
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.
State College Police Chief John Gardner, who retired in late 2025, previously told Spotlight PA that he wasn’t aware until 2022 that the FBI had updated its definition of rape. Gardner’s predecessor, Tom King, who retired from the department in 2016, said he only learned about the incorrect reporting when contacted by Spotlight PA this summer.
Borough Council President Evan Myers commended Madrid for taking on “this independent investigation.” However, when Council Member Nalini Krishnankutty asked Madrid to detail how the oversight board assessed the findings published by Spotlight PA, he said, “Investigation might be too strong a word.”
“We asked the State College Police Department for a ream of information on exactly what happened. They provided that information, and we assessed that the change in reporting was really a change of definition for standardization by the FBI,” Madrid told Krishnankutty. “We evaluated the thoroughness of the individual investigations of each of the incidents. It was determined that, wait a minute, what it was called didn’t make any difference.”
Asked by Council Member Gopal Balachandran how the oversight board determined that police’s investigation of each incident was thoroughly conducted, Madrid replied that the department told the board it applied the same protocol for investigating rapes and sexual assaults.
“So no, we didn’t take, ‘Show me case one, show me case two,’” Madrid said. “It was in total of these, of all of these reported incidents. Did you investigate thoroughly? And they did.”
Madrid did not respond to a request for comment from Spotlight PA to clarify when the oversight board’s review was initiated and concluded, or what it entailed.
Krishnankutty asked Madrid if any gap in communication between State College police and Pennsylvania State Police could be prevented in the future. Madrid did not answer that question.
As previously reported, a Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson 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.
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.
Agencies like the State College Police Department have to acknowledge receipt of every message sent over CLEAN, Snyder told Spotlight PA in October. It is not optional, and “lives depend on it.”
Balachandran told Spotlight PA after the Jan. 12 public meeting that following the publication of the newsroom’s December investigation, he observed misinformed reactions from the public regarding the police’s role in criminal prosecution, which the news story did not delve into.
Speaking in his individual capacity and not on behalf of the Borough Council, Balachandran said he “can see they made a mistake” in reporting crime statistics and it’s “good to call attention to it.”
Madrid’s statements echoed what State College police officials told reporters throughout the course of reporting. Matthew Wilson, a former assistant chief who is now chief in Ferguson Township, told Spotlight PA in a February 2025 interview that the police department wasn’t calling those incidents rapes, but it was calling them sexual offenses. “I don’t see it as a huge deal,” Wilson said.
Rapes fall into a crime category that includes the most severe offenses, according to FBI rules. 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, Spotlight PA previously reported. Sexual offenses belong in another category with lower penalties, and are treated with less urgency.
Anne Ard, former executive director of Centre Safe, told Spotlight PA in August 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,” Ard said.
At a Community Oversight Board meeting on Jan. 8, Madrid said the board had not received any public complaints regarding Spotlight PA’s findings. He said the board plans to host a town hall to address the rape investigation protocols of the State College Police Department this year.
If you or someone you know is experiencing sexual violence, Centre Safe is available 24/7 at 877-234-5050.