By calling on private-university police forces to expand the range of records they make available to the public, Ohio and Texas are joining a group of states in which lawmakers and the courts have brought reporting requirements at private institutions in line with standards at public ones.
The new standards — which arrived in Ohio through a Supreme Court ruling and in Texas through a bill passed by state lawmakers — show broader nationwide conversations about police authority and transparency are trickling down to college campuses. Because of that, they represent a positive step, said Darrel W. Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization of law-enforcement executives in the United States and Canada. “It may make people uncomfortable at times,” he said, “but for me, the more that’s open, the better.”
Still, he said, the changes won’t have much of an effect on the ground. Under the Clery Act, a federal law regulating campus-crime reporting, college officials are already required to supply basic details about crimes that pose a threat to campus safety. Since those notifications are intended as campus alerts, they do not name victims or suspects; typically each includes the time, the location, and a general description of the crime.
But public-college police forces are expected to do more than comply with the Clery Act: They are required to provide arrest and incident reports similar to those that a city force is compelled to release under state open-records laws. Those reports may identify suspects and victims.
The requirements facing private-college police forces have generally been less clear. Now, in Ohio and Texas — and in several other states, including Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia — the law recognizes private-college police forces as public offices subject to open-records laws. (A pending lawsuit that ESPN filed against the University of Notre Dame could determine whether that logic also applies in Indiana.)
A Call for Transparency
The Texas bill, which would amend the state’s existing education code, now heads to Gov. Greg Abbott for a signature; it could take effect as early as September. Sen. John Whitmire, a Democrat, proposed the bill in Texas in January after an August surveillance video showed two Rice University police officers beating a bicycle thief with batons. Independent Colleges and Universities of Texas, an association of about 40 private institutions in the state, voiced support for the bill.
In Ohio the Supreme Court’s ruling followed a lawsuit filed by an Otterbein University student who had requested arrest and incident records on 47 people arrested by the campus police. The request was denied, The Columbus Dispatch reported, but the court found that the denial had been unlawful. “We hold that the Otterbein police department is a public office,” the court ruled. “Therefore, the department can be compelled to produce public records.”
The Ohio ruling would affect about 15 licensed police forces at private colleges in the state, estimated C. Todd Jones, president and general counsel of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Ohio.
The police officers on those forces are licensed and sworn with the same responsibilities as city officers, which differentiates them from campus security officers, whose actions are not covered by the ruling, Mr. Jones said.
Many smaller institutions, including Oberlin College, do not have an accredited police force, exempting them from the change. Marjorie L. Burton, director of safety and security at Oberlin, said that because the college’s safety and security officers are not accredited as a force, they call in the city police to respond to assaults or felonies on the campus. She said the college would be compelled to release its own arrest and incident reports only through a subpoena.
Meanwhile, Otterbein University’s president, Kathy A. Krendl, said the institution would “certainly” comply with the ruling.
David L. Perry, president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators and assistant vice president for safety and chief of police at Florida State University, said he had not heard of any “knee-jerk reactions” to the changes so far.
He said the court rulings were part of a “growing trend” of demanding transparency in law enforcement.
Ms. Burton agrees. The Ohio ruling “does reflect that people are interested in transparency,” she said. Within two to five years, she said, “the whole country” could move toward similar reporting requirements.
Walking a Fine Line
The rulings leave private-college officials in a delicate balancing act between transparency and student privacy.
Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina, a Republican, signed off on a similar law last summer requiring private-college police forces to release their arrest records after a student journalist at Elon University sued when he was denied a full arrest-and-incident report. Elon is one of three private institutions in the state (along with Duke University and Davidson College) with a major police force.
Jonathan D. Jones, director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition and Sunshine Center, said that while the ruling was “a positive step, it’s not like it’s opening the door to all police files.” Because of the wording of the law, he said, officials are still able to fall back on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, known as Ferpa, to avoid identifying students.
“In general, the police departments have a pretty good ability to withhold,” Mr. Jones said.
Reconciling police-record disclosure with Ferpa requirements can be complicated for colleges because circumstances surrounding the release of records are “fact-specific,” said Steven J. McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design. Institutions may release law-enforcement documents under their states’ public-records laws, he said, but campus officials could decide to leave off details that could be used to identify other students not named in a report. For example, a college could release the name of a student, but it might choose not to name the student’s fraternity or student organization, Mr. McDonald said.
And Ferpa, Mr. McDonald said, does not mandate what shows up on campus police departments’ incident reports in the first place, “so it’s possible they wouldn’t put names on an incident report, and if they don’t, there’s nothing state law could do to compel them.”
Christine R. Williams, an associate director for research, entrepreneurship, and professional education at the Center for Legal & Court Technology at the College of William & Mary, said institutions, public or not, often redact parts of arrest records, like the identity of a student not charged with a crime, before releasing the documents. When she worked in the general counsel’s office at the University of Akron several years ago, such redactions were “not uncommon,” she said.
“It’s a balancing effort between privacy interests and not wanting to damage someone irreparably, and the public’s right to know,” Ms. Williams said.
Daniel J. Anderson, vice president for university communications at Elon University, said that before the North Carolina law passed, officials at the institution were never “withholding information per se.” He said the university’s police force — which includes 17 sworn police officers, 16 security staff members, and five dispatchers — uses the same software programs as the municipal police department in the surrounding town of Elon, N.C.
He said the university’s police department releases what’s called a “Page 1 and 2" incident report, which can include information like the name of a suspect, a witness, or a victim; details about property or drugs involved; and the responding officer’s narrative — all information also included in city reports.
But because of Ferpa restrictions, Mr. Anderson said, it would “be likely” that a report from the Elon University Police Department would contain less information in the narrative than would one from the city’s police force. Even after the North Carolina court ruling, he said, university officials did not provide requested information to student journalists because the state’s court ruled the institution had responded appropriately according to laws at the time.
“The ironic thing” about the new law, he said, is that “it really didn’t change much in the way we actually do day-to-day operations.”
