The Campus Security Act-A Tool To Involve The Campus Community In Crime Prevention

by S. Daniel Carter

This article originally appeared in the July/August 1997 issue (volume 27, no. 4) of the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, a publication of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.

S. Daniel Carter

Less than a month into the Fall Semester at an American university, a female freshman is raped by two varsity football players she had just met in her co-ed dormitory. At first she just wants to put the incident behind her, telling only her roommate about what had happened. At the beginning of the next semester she seeks assistance from the Women’s Center counselor and is promised a “fair chance” for justice under the school’s conduct code.

A hearing is held at the end of the Spring Semester and one of the athletes is found guilty and is suspended for one year. The finding is appealed and upheld. However, after the end of the school year the football player threatens to sue on the grounds that they were tried under the wrong code of conduct. A second hearing is held that eventually leads to a deferred suspension for a lesser conduct code violation of simple verbal abuse.

The campus police department has never been involved and is not aware of the incident until the victim takes her case to the media alleging that the school wanted to make sure her assailant could play on the team that year. The following year the victim’s attorney files a formal complaint under the Campus Security Act of 1990 with the United States Department of Education alleging that “my client believes that crime statistics reported by the school were knowingly inaccurate.”

The “Campus Security” report published two years after the incident and widely disseminated to students reported that in the year the assaults happened there were no rapes on campus and two counts of “other sex offenses.” The survivor’s attorney has documented that neither of the two reported offenses are related to her client’s case. In addition, “Rape” and “Other Sex Offenses” are not the categories required by the Act. Offenses are supposed to be categorized by “Sex Offenses, Forcible and Non-Forcible.”

If this school’s campus security report, which was produced by the campus police department, is found in non-compliance with the law, the school is put at risk of losing its Federal funding. While to date only one institution, Moorhead State University in Minnesota, has actually been fully investigated and found to be in non-compliance several other schools, including Miami University of Ohio, Clemson University and the University of Pennsylvania, are currently being investigated for understated statistics and inaccurate or missing policy statements.

How is it possible that the school could be found in non-compliance for not reporting a crime that was never made known to the campus police department? The Federal regulations implementing the Campus Security Act specify that crimes reported to “local police agencies or... any official of the institution who has significant responsibility for student and campus activities” must be included in the annual report (34 Code of Federal Regulations § 668.47). This is in part because not all covered institutions have even a basic campus security department and others have some form of cooperative agreement with off-campus authorities.

There has, however, been some confusion about who is required to report and under what circumstances. “We found considerable confusion with FERPA, and we do not know why this is the case because it should not (be). The FERPA law and this law (Campus Security Act) are not in conflict. We are working to try to help the higher education community come into compliance with both of those. Our ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, we think, does that,” said David Longanecker, the Assistant Secretary of Education during Congressional hearings on CSA compliance in June, 1996.

The “Dear Colleague” letter issued in May of 1996 stated that an “institution is not relieved of compliance with the reporting requirements of the campus security regulations when the institution refers a matter to a disciplinary committee, rather than to the institution’s law enforcement unit or directly to the local authorities” (U.S. Dept. of Education document GEN-96-11).

The “Program Review Report” in the Moorhead case was issued in September of 1996 and offers important determinations of how the Act is to be implemented. For example it makes it clear that “officials of the institution involved in student counseling are not excluded from the institution’s statistical reporting obligations (counselors are excluded only from the timely warning requirements of 34 CFR 668.47(e)).” It is the institution’s responsibility to coordinate information from all of the sources.

“All crimes reported to departments or administrators should be required to be reported to one central office for inclusion in crime statistics,” said Bob Mueck an officer with the University of Maryland at College Park campus police department. “I’d recommend that it be the campus police,” he added. The annual statistics are required to be compiled according to UCR standards and while another office, such as the dean of students or admissions, could possibly be responsible for producing the report it would be most appropriate for the campus law enforcement department to handle this compilation as they have the most experience in that area.

The Campus Security Act of 1990

Jeanne A. Clery

As most American college law enforcement officials are aware, Congress enacted The Student Right-To-Know and Campus Security Act in 1990 as Public Law 101-542. It came about through the efforts of several families whose children were murdered on colleges campuses in the late 80’s. This law requires all institutions of higher education which participate in Federal higher education funding programs to publish and provide to students and staff campus security information. At a minimum this information is to include statistics for six crime categories for the most recent three calendar years, three arrest categories for the most recent year, and statements of security policies.

“School administrators have used every available tactic to understate the actual amount of reported crimes on their campuses,” said Connie Clery, who with her husband Howard founded Security On Campus after their daughter Jeanne was murdered at Lehigh University in 1986 and were the driving force behind the Act. “We discovered the scandalous amount of campus crime information which Lehigh University administrators withheld from students and parents. What we didn’t know cost Jeanne her life!”

The Act was amended in 1992 to provide certain basic rights to survivors of sexual assaults on campus. In addition, there was a related amendment made that year to FERPA which effectively removed law enforcement records from the confidentiality protections of the law. Prior to this, many institutions had restricted access to crime report information which would have otherwise been public.

The Department of Education issued the final compliance regulations in 1994 and issued regulations affecting FERPA in January of 1995 which for the first time clarified that FERPA could not be used to justify not including campus crimes handled exclusively by student judicial hearings in the annual statistics. In recent years, the DOE has come under fire for not adequately enforcing the Act . Congress unanimously passed a resolution last year calling for enforcement to be made a priority.

The Accuracy in Campus Crime Reporting Act of 1997

Addressing the concerns of many victims, parents, student journalists and campus law enforcement officials, Congress has introduced legislation that would amend the Campus Security Act. This new bill expands on provisions from the “Open Campus Police Logs Act” which was considered during the last Congress, but was not enacted, and would help to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the implementation of the original Act.

“The Accuracy in Campus Crime Reporting Act was carefully structured to eliminate the loopholes in the Campus Security Act so that accurate crime information will be provided to consumers of higher education,” said Ben Clery, Jeanne’s brother and President of Security On Campus, Inc. This legislation was introduced by Congressmen John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-TN) and Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) on February 12, 1997 as HR 715 and has strong bipartisan support with 40 co-sponsors.

The ACCRA bill expands the categories of crime statistics reported annually under the Campus Security Act to more closely parallel those reported in the Uniform Crime Reporting program. This expansion includes the category of larceny, which was requested by Doug Tuttle, then IACLEA President, during the 1996 Congressional hearings on the implementation of the CSA.

The bill also provides for the annual collection of these statistics by the U.S. Department of Education so that a central source of statistics will exist as it does for other communities. The DOE was chosen instead of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s UCR program due to the possible conflict of including statistics reported to non law enforcement offices on campus. Participation, however, in the UCR program will be unaffected. The bill does add a list of campus administrators to the list of who has to report for annual statistics, but this is intended only to clarify in the statute those administrators who are currently covered by the regulations.

Don Baldwin, Mark Goodman, Ben Clery, Connie Clery, Steve Geiman, Jennifer McMenamin, Beth George and Tom Burkett in Washington, D.C.
Photo by S. Daniel Carter

With exceptions for information needed to protect victims, witnesses and ongoing investigations, campus police logs will be opened to public inspection. This section of the bill was drafted to allow as much flexibility as possible. Departments which already provide at least the minimum information of offense type, general location and time in a written format should be able to continue their current programs unchanged.

The other side of campus law enforcement is also addressed, campus courts will be opened and Federal confidentiality of “education records” will be removed from all allegations of criminal activity required to be reported under the campus crime reporting law. This opening will remove the motivation to not notify campus police, said Crystal J. Paulk one of the first student journalists to cover the campus disciplinary hearings at the University of Georgia after they were opened by the state Supreme Court in 1993. State supported institutions in Georgia are the only schools in the nation with open student courts.

“University disciplinary boards are the only closed courtrooms in America,” said Jennifer E. Markiewicz, the former editor of The Miami Student at Miami University of Ohio. “The secrecy they have been allowed to operate under only serves to paralyze the entire community from protecting itself against violence on campus.” Markiewicz, a recent graduate, and The Miami Student are involved in a lawsuit seeking access to disciplinary board information under Ohio’s public records law.

Although the DOE has stated that FERPA does not per se bar access to disciplinary hearings, image conscious administrators continue to hide behind this law. “If schools perpetuate hidden barriers, women will never get an equal education,” said Sheronne Thorpe, the survivor of a brutal rape by two athletes at Virginia State University her Freshman year in 1995. Thorpe, who missed a year of school after the assault, is now suing her old school and calling on Congress to reform the system, she was recently featured in a USA Today article.

Experts also believe that the use of such diversion to under-report student crime is wide spread. “Based on the Student Press Law Center’s work with student newspaper editors, reporters and advisers at colleges around the country in recent years, I have become persuaded that the majority of schools routinely under-report the number of serious criminal incidents that occur on campus in their annual crime statistics,” said Mark Goodman the Executive Director of the Arlington, VA based Student Press Law Center. “Without access to campus police logs and the outcome of campus disciplinary proceedings that involve allegations of criminal behavior, students have no means for assuring that the statistics their school provides are accurate.”

Student journalists are often unable now to inform their communities about the same types of incidents that their professional peers write and broadcast about every day of the year. “Students on America’s college campuses need to know as much about their community as any resident of any town needs and wants to know about theirs,” said Steve Geimann the President of the Society of Professional Journalists.

This legislation would allow students to have the information that they need to protect themselves according to students supporting its passage. “It’s about my right, as a tuition paying student... to know the truth about the potential threats to my safety on campus so that I can adequately protect myself,” said Jennifer McMenamin a junior at the University of Maryland at College Park. “And its about future students’ right to know and choose a college based on all the facts, rather than just the ones the administration or the public relations office would like them to see.”

The House is expected to consider the provisions of this legislation during the reauthorization later this year of the Higher Education Act of 1965 with Senate consideration coming in 1998. The full text of the ACCRA bill can be obtained on the Security On Campus, Inc. Web Site at http://www.soconline.org or by calling our main office at (610) 768-9330.

Conclusion

Students need to be informed about crimes when they happen so that they will be motivated to take action to avoid victimization themselves. While not all students may heed these warnings, those that want to be a part of the campus security process and want to take responsible precautions have the right to know. To deny them this right is dangerous to the student who could be victimized and to the school which is exposed to possible civil liability.

Those institutions which choose to embrace a culture of non-disclosure and circumvent normal law enforcement procedures do a disservice to those students they claim to “educate” by depriving them of “real world” consequences, often denying true justice to the victim, and worst of all denying the community a true accounting of the dangers that face them. While it shouldn’t be necessary, the Campus Security Act can serve as a tool to campus law enforcement officials by bringing together campus administrations and students as part of the campus security team.

About The Author

S. Daniel Carter serves as the Southeast Regional Vice President of Security On Campus, Inc. He is responsible for the “SOConline Project” of which he serves as director, and deals with public policy issues. Carter previously was the Tennessee state chapter director for the Georgia based student crime safety organization Safe Campuses Now and organized student crime patrols, crimewatch newsletters and self-defense seminars. He graduated from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 1994 with a B.A. in Political Science.