A masked man pointed a gun at a student and commanded her to get in his car, not far from the center of the University of Connecticut’s campus.
The young woman started to obey, but the man had forgotten to unlock the passenger-side door. She screamed and ran toward a university employee nearby. The masked driver sped away.
The incident, in 2012, could have ended as a terrifying mystery, with an unknown attacker on the loose. But within a few hours of the attempted kidnapping, Bruce Alan Ursin was in custody. Police found a .45-caliber handgun in his truck, along with a duffel bag containing gloves, duct tape, rope, and Vaseline. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Barbara R. O’Connor, director of public safety and chief of police at the university, says she believes that Mr. Ursin would have been caught eventually. But he was taken off the street within hours thanks to the federal campus-crime-reporting law known as the Clery Act, which requires that Connecticut—and colleges across the country—be prepared to notify students and faculty and staff members of emergencies and security threats.
That is just the kind of fundamental improvement advocates of the law had hoped would follow from its passage 25 years ago. Since then the Clery Act has made students safer—at least in some ways.
But its effects have come with costs, complications, and limits. Colleges spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of working hours to count their crimes according to Clery’s rules and to produce annual security reports that apparently few students read.
Guidance for compliance with the law, spelled out in a 285-page handbook, is vague in key spots. Under Clery, college police forces have to categorize campus crimes according to often idiosyncratic definitions that don’t match up with national standards. The guidelines tell the police not to count crimes that happen off university property, even if just by a few feet. At the same time, college officials must try to track down crime statistics from foreign countries where students on college programs may have spent a handful of nights.
And even if they do read the reports, students get only a limited view of how safe their campuses are.
The Clery Act has shaped campus safety since before this year’s graduating class was born and has defined the work of a generation of campus police. Now, many observers say, it’s time to rethink or at least simplify the regulation.
Consider the complexities of complying with Clery in the arrest of the attempted-kidnapping suspect at Connecticut.
Under the law, all colleges must alert the campus community to emergency situations and disseminate information about crimes that could pose a threat to safety. The warning must be "timely." But the language characterizing "timely" is far from precise. The Education Department’s handbook emphasizes that "a warning should be issued as soon as the pertinent information is available … even if you don’t have all of the facts."
Ms. O’Connor says her police department could have sent out an electronic alert within 30 minutes, when all that the campus police knew was that the suspect was said to be driving a "dark vehicle." But that kind of a message would have been ineffective, she says.
Instead, officials waited nearly an hour, until they had interviewed eyewitnesses and checked security-camera footage. After a detailed description emerged of the middle-aged white male suspect, his camouflage clothing, and his late-model silver or gray Toyota pickup, officials sent a text message to everyone on the campus. A university employee called in to report spotting a truck like the one described.
Was that warning timely enough to satisfy the Clery requirement? Ms. O’Connor doesn’t know. While the outcome was good for the student and the campus, the Education Department might still have considered the notification as coming too late. And when the incident was included in the university’s annual security report for 2012, how much did it inform prospective students, in the unlikely event they read it? The event is listed as a "forcible sex offense," a statistic, with no context.
For all of its painstaking accounting of on-campus crime, the Clery Act offers a narrow view of the actual risks to students.
For one thing, many campus crimes go unreported. A student whose smartphone disappears from a table in the library may not bother to mention it. Victims of more serious crimes, such as sexual assaults, may decide not to contact authorities.
Students often live, work, and play off campus, and if they’re victimized on a city street or at a house party, Clery data won’t reflect that. Dolores A. Stafford, a former chief of police at George Washington University and a consultant to colleges on Clery compliance, estimates that during her time at George Washington, as many as two-thirds of sexual assaults on students took place off campus.
At Connecticut, to cite an example of the complications involved in Clery compliance, Ms. O’Connor need only point out her office window.
Just beyond her building sits a two-story shopping plaza. It was in the parking lot of that plaza, in 2010, that a student, Jafar Karzoun, was killed.
During a fight, Edi Rapo, a student at nearby Manchester Community College, punched Mr. Karzoun once in the face. He fell to the ground and never regained consciousness, dying eight days later. Mr. Rapo pleaded no contest to manslaughter and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
The university police included Mr. Karzoun’s killing in its 2010 security report, determining that it should be counted under Clery as a homicide even though the parking lot where it occurred was not campus property. Under Clery, colleges must report crimes that occur on public property adjacent to campus property.
However, a couple of years later, when Ms. O’Connor had started work at Connecticut and was reviewing Clery Act compliance, she decided that the homicide should not have been counted under the federal law. (Her conclusion is shared by Ms. Stafford, the consultant.) The Connecticut police chief isn’t out to hide anything; she readily volunteers the anecdote. But even though it is bordered on three sides by the campus, the parking lot of the shopping plaza is private property, and for the purposes of Clery, she has determined, does not count.
So, even though a university student was killed within steps of the campus grounds, anyone combing through Connecticut’s Clery statistics now won’t learn about it.
A student’s homicide is exactly the kind of information that Howard Clery Jr. and Connie Clery wished they’d had access to before their daughter Jeanne, their youngest child, enrolled at Lehigh University in 1985.
The bucolic campus, about 50 miles from the family’s home, in Bryn Mawr, Pa., seemed safe. But in April of her freshman year, Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her dorm room by a fellow student. Only afterward did her parents learn that Lehigh had experienced a spate of violent crimes in the preceding years.
They formed an advocacy group, now known as the Clery Center for Security on Campus, and began to press for laws to force colleges to be more transparent about crime. Their work led to 30 state laws plus the Clery Act.
But the federal regulation hardly transformed campus security overnight.
In its early years, the Education Department’s scrutiny of colleges’ compliance was relatively rare, often prompted by complaints filed by the group formed by the Clerys. But over the past five years, police chiefs say, enforcement has gotten more vigorous and less forgiving.
A department official, who asked not to be named because he was not speaking in an official capacity, says that the standards for compliance are not significantly more stringent now than they were a decade ago, but confirms that the volume of the program reviews has grown. In 2010 the department created a team of staff members dedicated to Clery oversight and enforcement, in part to handle a growing number of complaints alleging Clery Act violations. (The Clery Center, once the most active watchdog, has shifted its mission toward education in recent years and no longer files Clery complaints.)
The official notes that the department has increased the amount of technical assistance it offers colleges for compliance with Clery, but it also continues to build up its enforcement. The Clery team had six members in 2010. It now has 14 and is still growing.
James L. Moore III, director of Clery compliance for the Department of Education, testified before a Senate committee last summer that the agency was conducting 47 program reviews, either routine checks or investigations brought on by complaints or news coverage of a high-profile crime. Connecticut is still waiting to hear the outcome of a Clery audit performed in 2011 in the wake of Mr. Zaroun’s death and a murder on campus the year before.
The increased scrutiny has increased anxieties, as well as costs, on campuses.
Sometimes the department has acted in response to extreme cases. After the shootings at Virginia Tech, in 2007, the Clery Act was amended to require that colleges be prepared to send mass emergency notifications.
The department issued an unprecedentedly large fine for a Clery violation, $357,500, against Eastern Michigan University, where a student was found dead in her dorm room in 2006. Despite suspicious circumstances and a police homicide investigation, university administrators made public assurances that foul play was not suspected. The institution maintained that position until February 2007, when a fellow student was charged with the victim’s rape and murder. (The university appealed the fine, which was reduced by $7,500.) The student was later convicted of murder.
In other cases, though, audits zero in on what amount to paperwork mistakes. For example, the department audited the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Midlands Technical College, in South Carolina, in 2010, and found a burglary logged as a larceny at the former, and two burglaries miscategorized at the latter. The department fined the colleges $10,000 for each mistake.
The process of counting and publishing crime statistics has created an increasing amount of work for college police forces—and the specific tasks required can sometimes seem absurd. Some chiefs argue that aspects of the law are more effective at generating paperwork than protecting students. "If you’re distracted by the manual," says Kathy R. Zoner, chief of police at Cornell University, "your head’s not going to be up looking around for what you need to be doing."
Among the law’s requirements is one that tells colleges to report on crimes that occur on "noncampus property," locations that are not part of an actual campus but that are controlled by the college and used for educational purposes. Guidance issued by the department in 2011 says colleges that own or lease facilities in other countries must try to account for crime statistics there, too, in their annual security reports.
To comply with the "noncampus property" rule, the Connecticut police department has to keep track of which of the university’s many schools and programs hold educational activities off campus. Even its dozens of sports teams can fall under the rule during road trips if they stay more than a couple of nights in the same place. Ms. O’Connor says she advises coaches to try not to use the same hotel in the same city more than once, to minimize the possibility.
Once the police department has a list of noncampus properties—Connecticut identified more than 75 potential sites last year—it must then determine which police organizations—whether in a nearby town, another state, or another country—might have crime data for the neighborhood in which a particular class is held or study-abroad program is located. Then it must send a written request for a list of crimes in the immediate area whenever Connecticut students were present.
The campus police force rarely receives any response to such queries, much less usable data. Even if it does, the response may not help give an accurate picture of campus safety. "It’s misleading to the consumer when they see a statistic from a ‘noncampus’ property, and they have no idea it really happened at a hotel in London that the school was using for a week," Ms. Stafford says.
As some large institutions do, Connecticut assigns a full-time staff member to Clery compliance. The university spends $400,000 a year to pay for the staffing, training, and other expenses required to comply with the law.
For smaller institutions, compliance can be a serious challenge. For example, Webster University, in Missouri, has tried to expand its educational reach with 70 domestic branch campuses and six small international campuses. But the private university’s campus-safety operation relies on security guards hired at hourly wages, along with a handful of student volunteers.
Clery-compliance duties fell to Daniel P. Pesold, who was director of public safety until he retired in January. In addition to his primary duties overseeing police and fire safety, he had to send more than 100 letters each year to police departments just in the United States, as well as keep track of crime statistics from the main campus, to compile the annual security report.
College police forces might be more sanguine about gathering every last statistic if they thought that students actually read their annual security reports.
Connecticut’s report, like the department’s guidance, has ballooned in size. The university’s 2010 security report was 17 pages long. Its mostrecent edition, from 2013, is 153 pages.
When Ms. O’Connor speaks to campus groups, she often asks them if they’ve read the report. In each of the 14 years she’s been a college police chief, she says, "maybe one or two people" answer yes. Ask a couple of dozen students in the Student Union about the Clery Act, and only one recognizes the name—a resident assistant, one of about 1,000 "campus security authorities" at the university who are trained to file reports on crimes.
The scant research on the attention paid by students and their parents to crime data isn’t much more encouraging. In the early 2000s, Steven M. Janosik, an associate professor of education at Virginia Tech, found that only about 25 percent of students or their parents who were surveyed knew about the Clery Act, and that fewer than 10 percent used crime statistics in the annual security reports in choosing a college.
Mr. Janosik suspects that awareness of campus safety, sexual assault, and the Clery Act has increased since that study, more than a decade ago. But, he adds in an email, security reports probably "are still not consulted as often as we might hope."
Even given the Clery Act’s pinhole view of campus crime, and the difficulties that many colleges have in complying with it, the law remains the foundation of campus safety in the United States. But many people hope to make it simpler and more effective.
A Congressional task force released a report last month with recommendations for overhauling Clery, among other regulations that some lawmakers say tangle colleges in too much red tape. The proposals include specifying that the police should use their best judgment as to "timely warnings" and simplifying or eliminating the reporting of statistics from "noncampus" locations, such as study-abroad programs. The task force was convened by Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who heads the Senate committee that oversees education, so its recommendations are likely to be taken seriously when Congress takes up legislation to renew the Higher Education Act.
Alison Kiss, executive director of the Clery Center for Security on Campus, agrees that some aspects of the law could be improved. But one law alone can’t make campuses safer. Colleges need to do more than simply comply, she says. They need to be proactive. They must make sure that the campus police are adequately supported, not only in their policing duties but also in their efforts to comply with the regulations. Colleges, she adds, also need to do a better job of supporting students who are victims of crime, including survivors of sexual assault.
If Clery compliance is the floor, Ms. Kiss says, colleges need to aim for the ceiling.
Much of the conversation about student safety on campus, in fact, occurs outside the realm of Clery and is now focused on other efforts, such as complying with the federal sex-discrimination law known as Title IX. At Connecticut and elsewhere, student activists are pressing their colleges to do a better job of preventing sexual assault.
At Connecticut, Suzanne Cayer, a sophomore, is among those urging the university to be more proactive about preventing crime and improving the campus environment for women. Students there filed a Title IX complaint and a federal lawsuit against the institution in 2013 for what they said was its inadequate response to sexual assaults. The lawsuit wassettled for more than $1.2-million, and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said it would investigate the complaint.
In theory, says Ms. Cayer, a leader of a student group called Revolution Against Rape, it’s good that a law like Clery exists to inform people about the scope of a problem like sexual assault on a campus. But in practice, it isn’t so simple.
Ms. Cayer says she was sexually assaulted by another student at a fraternity party a year ago. But what happened to her won’t be noted on the university’s annual security report, because it took place off campus, at a fraternity house. And survivors of rape do not always report the incident to the police, or anyone else, right away, she says, since they often need time to process what has happened.
In fact, the Clery Act can complicate how victims decide to seek help. Under the law, campus-security authorities are required to report any crimes they learn about. That means a sexual-assault victim can’t discuss her experience with her dormitory’s resident assistant or even with the campus women’s center without generating a report of a crime.
At Connecticut, there were 18 Clery-reportable sexual assaults on campus in 2013, according to the most recent security report, up from 13 the year before and eight in 2011. But almost every other crime category is down, mirroring national trends.
And the university is taking a number of steps to make the campus safer, including providing training for all freshmen in bystander intervention and creating a special-victims unit in the police department to respond to sexual violence.
On a recent snowy Friday, things were slow at the department—a couple of larcenies, a call about an incident of harassment, a call about drugs. Some of the incidents may make it into next year’s security report, but the statistics matter only so much.
The Clery Act has made sure that information is out there, that campus safety is part of the conversation. But fixing Clery alone will not fix campus safety.
"Now that your crime data’s out there," says Ms. O’Connor, the police chief, "what are you going to do about it?"
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/25-Years-Later-Has-Clery/228305