Eastern Michigan University violated federal crime-reporting law on multiple counts by failing to warn students and employees of a murder on the campus in December and by inconsistently logging and disclosing other crimes over a three-year span, the U.S. Department of Education said in a report released last week.
In December university staff members discovered Laura Dickinson, a freshman, dead on the floor of her dormitory room, naked from the waist down, with a pillow over her face. The university released a written statement that there was “no reason to suspect foul play,” and did not correct that public impression until late February, when another student, Orange Amir Taylor III, was charged with Ms. Dickinson’s rape and murder.
“EMU remained silent despite the fact that its university police department had identified a suspect and had been engaged in a homicide investigation with other local law-enforcement agencies,” the Education Department said in its report.
The report reprimands the university for “serious violations” of the Clery Act, the federal law that requires colleges and universities to disclose information about crimes on their campuses and to warn students and employees of threats to their safety.
The university violated the Clery Act’s “timely warning” provision in extreme fashion, the Education Department said: “Not only did EMU fail to disclose information that would enable the campus community to make informed decisions and take necessary precautions to protect themselves, but it issued misleading statements from the outset, providing false reassurance that foul play was not suspected.”
Some university officials said they did not disclose information because there was insufficient evidence a crime had occurred, according to the report. But it points out that letters from the Michigan State Police to the university’s president, John A. Fallon III, said the case was being investigated as a homicide from the start.
Mr. Fallon has said his first indication of a crime was the arrest of Mr. Taylor. In recent weeks, some faculty members have called for the president’s ouster.
Apart from its handling of information about Ms. Dickinson’s death, Eastern Michigan also violated the Clery Act in other ways, according to the Education Department’s report. The university did not have a timely-warning policy, nor did it accurately and consistently report campus-crime statistics, the report said. For example, between 2003 and 2005, the university classified several forcible-sex offenses as nonforcible, the document said. In 2005, Eastern Michigan reported fewer alcohol- and drug-related arrests to the campus than it did to the Education Department.
Possible Fines
The report outlined seven violations of the Clery Act and spelled out corrective action the university must take for each offense. In requirements stemming from several citations, the report asks the university to submit updated policies to the Education Department. It also asks for independent validation of all crime statistics for the 2004, 2005, and 2006 calendar years. The university’s Board of Regents received the 18-page document last week.
The board had commissioned an independent review of the university’s response to Ms. Dickinson’s killing, and released a report on that investigation, by the Detroit-based law firm Butzel Long, last month. The law firm’s report was highly critical of the university, calling its mismanagement of the case a “systemic failure.”
The Education Department’s report — officially a “campus-security-program review” — began after a complaint from the watchdog group Security on Campus, and it largely confirms the law firm’s report.
“It has given us a focus to take a good, long, hard look at all of the policies and procedures we have at the university,” said James F. Stapleton, a regent. “Our goal is to upgrade, and implement when necessary, procedures and systems that will make the university not only a safe place for students, faculty, and staff, but also one that operates more efficiently,” he said.
The regents will make personnel decisions in the coming weeks, Mr. Stapleton said.
S. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security on Campus, said he was satisfied with the report and with the response of Eastern Michigan officials. “They’re at the point where they pretty much recognize that they’ve done all of these things wrong, and they are working to correct them,” he said.
Mr. Carter commended the university for its work with local and state law-enforcement authorities in collecting evidence and arresting a suspect. “They did some stuff with the Clery Act totally wrong,” he said, “but they actually did what they were supposed to do in investigating the crime itself.” The university has hired Security on Campus to conduct Clery Act training with 50 staff members this summer.
Eastern Michigan has 30 days to respond to the Education Department’s report, but the facts of the case are already established, Mr. Carter said. “It would be kind of hard for them to contest anything when they’ve issued their own report” — the 568-page Butzel Long investigation — “that is much more detailed than this one.”
The Education Department will issue a final report within 45 days of Eastern Michigan’s response. Then the government may levy fines of up to $27,500 for each violation of the Clery Act. Fines could apply to each misreported statistic, Mr. Carter said, as well as to broader violations of the law.
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 53, Issue 45, Page A25
