Sexual assaults reported to the University of Michigan Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center increased for the third straight year, according to the U-M Department of Public Safety’s annual report.

The report released by the department on Friday showed 50 sexual assaults were reported to the SAPAC in 2010. That number is up from 45 in 2009.

It continued an upward trend from 2008, when 36 sexual assaults were reported to SAPAC, according to the report. One forcible fondling incident was reported to university police by SAPAC, the report showed.

The reports taken by SAPAC can vary widely and don't necessarily reflect assaults that actually took place on campus in 2010, according to center director Holly Rider-Milkovich. The incidents SAPAC deals with can come from reports to SAPAC workers, the center’s crisis line, anonymous reports, interactions off campus or in remote locations and incidents that may have occurred in the past, she said.

University police had 15 crimes of a sexual nature reported directly to them in 2010, all of them occurring on campus property, according to the report

However, U-M police Chief Greg O’Dell cautioned against reading too much into the statistics because of the small amounts of crime the department is dealing with.

“There’s generally not enough information to be statistically significant,” he said. “If you had four incidents of something and then the next year you had two, it’s not completely accurate to say crime is down 50 percent.”

The university is required to release an annual report in accordance with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act.

Rider-Milkovich said 95 percent of all crimes of a sexual nature are usually not reported. It’s difficult to get a good handle on whether incidents of sexual crime are going up or down when keeping that statistic in mind, she said.

“Sexual assault and sexual violence are the most under-reported crimes on college campuses and in the general populaton,” she said.

According to the report, the majority of crimes reported on campus were larcenies, with 840 reported in 2010. Most of those larcenies were thefts from a building, with a total of 572 reported in 2010, the report showed.

There were 74 more larcenies reported in 2010 than in 2009, but the total number of larcenies reported in 2010 was still less than the 861 reported in 2008.

O’Dell said year-to-date statistics for 2011 show larcenies are down about 32 percent as compared with the same time in 2010.

Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Diane Brown said the university is not required to give out information regarding larcenies by the Clery Act, but does so because it’s the most frequent crime the department deals with.

The report is for all crime from Jan. 1, 2010, until Dec. 31, 2010. It includes information from public property, such as sidewalks and streets, around university properties.

Brown said crime as a whole is going down on campus and has been doing so for the past few years.

“We have been under a multi-year decline in crime on campus,” she said.

Fewer incidents were reported to the SAPAC than in 2009 in almost every category except sexual assaults, the report stated.

According to the report, there were 13 reported incidents of intimate partner violence, 12 reported incidents of stalking and 11 reported incidents of sexual harassment. There were 35 reported incidents of intimate partner violence, 22 reported incidents of stalking and 11 reported incidents of sexual harassment in 2009, according to the report.

There was one fire reported in 2010, according to the report. In the early hours of April 20, 2010, an intentional fire was lit at Alice Lloyd Hall, 100 Observatory St. The fire did not result in monetary damages, according to the report.

O’Dell said campus police use the report to identify places where they need to focus on reducing crime. For instance, the report indicated a slight increase in burglaries, which means university police will work on educating people on campus on how to protect themselves.

“We always have crimes against persons as our No. 1 priority,” O’Dell said. “We do everything we can to make campus and the surrounding area as safe as possible.”

• To view the entire report, click here.

Kyle Feldscher covers cops and courts for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at kylefeldscher@annarbor.com or you can follow him on Twitter.