Some fear the statute will hurt innocent students who share common names with criminals
College officials are facing tough questions as they carry out a new federal law intended to help them track registered sex offenders living or working on campuses. One quandary: How widely should college police officials publicize the presence of such individuals on campuses?
The law, which went into effect in late October, is called the Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act. It requires sex offenders, when they register with the state, to indicate whether and where they are enrolled, employed, or volunteering on a college campus. By October 1, 2003, states must share that information with the relevant colleges, and the colleges must tell students, faculty members, and administrators where information on registered sex offenders can be obtained.
Colleges themselves are not required to gather information on sex offenders, nor to ask students, prospective students, employees, prospective employees, or volunteers about their criminal records.
At first, some college officials were baffled because the new law seemed to conflict with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which shields the privacy of students’ education records. But matters were clarified by guidelines released in late October by the U.S. Department of Justice, spelling out how colleges should comply with the new law. The law also includes a provision amending Ferpa to give colleges the right to publish the registry information without getting prior consent from the named students.
In fact, some proponents of the law say its intent is to close a loophole that kept some campuses from informing the public about registered sex offenders, for fear that doing so would run afoul of student-privacy laws.
“Campus police ought to have the same access to and ability to distribute sex-offender registry information that any other police department has,” says S. Daniel Carter, vice president of Security on Campus, a nonprofit campus-safety organization.
Only seven states have passed laws establishing procedures for carrying out the federal law, he says. “In most states, the details haven’t been worked out yet.”
How Public?
While colleges wait for states to report to them, they are struggling with the matter of how they will present the information. The law requires only that colleges notify the public in some way that the updated registry of sex offenders exists, and that it make the registry available for perusal. Most colleges have chosen to place printed copies of the registry in the campus police department and make its existence known either through the college’s Web site or by mailing out pamphlets that direct students and others to its location.
The State University of New York at Binghamton has gone a step further, making a place on its Web site for a list of sex offenders who work or are enrolled on the campus (http://publicsafety.binghamton.edu/Registry.htm). For now, the list contains no names.
“Our students are so wired, and I mean that in a good way -- they are technologically savvy -- that this is the way most will access it,” says Barbara Westbrook, the university’s associate counsel. If anyone at Binghamton is registered as a sex offender, she says, the college’s Web site will make clear that a name has been added.
Some colleges have decided that it is better to keep a paper copy of the registry at a campus office and require people to go there to view it.
Gene Deisinger, captain of Iowa State’s police department, says the university is evaluating the best way to make the information available, based on the number of requests and the costs of putting a list on its Web site. “There isn’t currently a Web site in the works,” he says.
The state has notified the department about five people -- three students, a former student, and a faculty member -- who are registered sex offenders. Their crimes include sexual exploitation of a child, assault with intent to commit sexual abuse, and sexual assault on a child.
The university police department’s policy is to give out only the names of sex offenders who have been classified as “high risk” by state officials, and then only if someone requests the information. “Right now, I’m not seeing a demonstrated need for immediate access to it,” the police captain says. It refers other requests for sex-registry information to the county sherriff’s office, says Mr. Deisinger.
Common Names
One concern with publication of the registries -- for campuses and for states -- is that the presence of common names may lead to misapprehensions about innocent persons with those name, says Charles Carletta, general counsel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
“First you have to make sure the person the state identified as an offender is the same person carrying that name on campus,” he says. “How many John Smiths are there? You have to make sure you have the right one.”
Mr. Carter, of Security on Campus, says colleges should make sure to include a photograph or other identifying information about offenders to avoid such confusion.
Some colleges take a case-by-case approach. John R. Sutton, a police lieutenant at Arizona State University, says that if a reported sex offender is deemed predatory, police officers will place fliers around the campus with “pictures on them, what they’re convicted of, and where they’re living.” At a minimum, the campus-security office maintains a list of any sex offenders that the state has reported to them, he says. “We’ll evaluate each [case] and make a determination at that point as to how far we want to publicize that information.”
It is difficult to say how effective the new law is, says Tim McGraw, a lieutenant in the University of Colorado at Boulder’s police department, which has had several students and news reporters ask to see its list of registered sex offenders affiliated with the university. “It’s impossible to quantify crime-preventive effectiveness because the crimes obviously never happen,” he says.
“But it’s important to be knowledgeable so you can take the appropriate actions and be aware” of the presence of sex offenders. “These exist everywhere, including college campuses.”
Jeffrey R. Young contributed to this article.
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 49, Issue 20, Page A33