The Police Report to Student Publication Pipeline

Because there isn’t consensus among students about what police accountability and mandatory reporting should look like, student journalists across the country grapple with how to use the Clery Act ethically at their schools.

The Student Press Law Center calls the Clery Act “a college journalist’s holy grail to reporting on campus crime.” The law was designed with student safety, not necessarily student newspapers, in mind: after Jeanne Clery was murdered in her dorm in 1986, her parents argued that they would not have sent their daughter to the university had they known how crime-ridden the campus was. Now, Clery dictates that all colleges must notify students about crimes or threats of violence through a daily log and annual report. At private universities, Clery is the only way students can access information about their private police force’s activity.

When Clery has national media attention, it’s usually because a university violated it. In 2014, for example, Virginia Tech was issued a fine for failing to warn its students ahead of the 2007 shooting. But in student newsrooms, articles citing the Act are published often multiple times per day.

At UCLA, reporters at The Daily Bruin use their school’s Clery data to produce Crimewatch, a monthly column aggregating information received from police reports paired with a map of crime locations. They also write breaking news crime briefs. At George Washington University, my alma mater, The Hatchet reports a weekly crime log by using the school’s daily crime alerts and interviewing a university police detective for more details.

Because student newsrooms are often smaller and have fewer resources and protections than their professional media counterparts, Clery offers an opportunity for young reporters to act as watchdogs in their local communities. Consider that UCLA’s police force, UCPD, is a government agency with jurisdiction over 82,500 people, and the last time that the Los Angeles Times reported on it was back in April. The Daily Bruin covers it daily.

While Clery makes for a steady stream of reporting, the articles relying on its data are not without their issues. Not every university publication has a dedicated fact-checking staff, and between school and jobs (at many universities, working on the paper does not pay), students understandably don’t always have the time to devote to interrogating their campus police. At The Hatchet, the paper had to stop writing individual blogs for each crime alert due to a lack of staffing, while at The Daily Bruin, much of the existing city and crime coverage paused or discontinued when reporters graduated or transitioned to other beats, causing institutional knowledge about how crime reporting gets done to be lost.

Then there’s the issue of student privacy, especially when the crime logs technically make public any time a student reports sexually violent or other highly personal crimes. At Columbia University, students criticized their campus Clery reports for reinforcing anti-Black racism and failing to report sexual assault on campus. On the other hand, at Indiana University, students are currently protesting their police department’s decision to no longer list specific locations of sexual assault crimes in their logs. A 2020 issue of The Hatchet reported on a case found through Clery where a faculty member suspected a student might be experiencing domestic violence. Though the student did not want to file a police report, the case was still covered in the piece. (Lia DeGroot, Editor-in-Chief at The Hatchet, was not involved with Crime Log at the time but said that selecting cases for the Log is determined on a case-by-case basis).

Some student journalists view their publications differently from professional media. Justin Jung, a Study Hall member and Daily Bruin City and Crime Editor, told me he sees Crimewatch more as “making police data more visually accessible to our readers” than a reported story would be. Like a community resource might include, there is a disclosure at the bottom of Crimewatch that reads “Some cases listed in this story are currently under investigation. Anyone with information can call UCPD,” and it includes their phone number. On this practice, Jung admitted he hadn’t considered removing the note at the bottom of the column, but that he sees the inclusion of a UCPD resource as “serving the public.”

In that vein, reporters aren’t the only ones using Clery. The Cops off Campus Coalition at UCSD actually cites the Act in their zine about police abolition. And at Yale, an alliance of student groups released a detailed report in March analyzing daily Clery logs, call logs, and use of force reports to make their case for police abolition. Callie Benson-Williams, the executive director of Black Students for Disarmament at Yale, a part of the alliance, said that despite the university adhering to Clery guidelines and the university police meeting with abolitionist groups, information was difficult to trace. And, though Clery was designed to increase transparency between universities, students, and their families, school leadership may still not be telling the whole truth.

Just as Clery data is often published without additional reporting, at Yale’s student publication, the Yale Daily News, “administrator and police word is taken as truth,” according to Benson-Williams. Last year, a YDN article interviewed the assistant chief of the Yale Police Department about calls from students to defund and abolish campus police. In the article, he said that his department receives twenty to thirty thousand calls per year, a number that would overwhelm the local New Haven force if YPD were to cease to exist. The Daily News did not check this fact, though the Abolition Alliance did—they found the figure to be closer to ten thousand. On the contrary, Benson-Williams said that she has seen the Daily News fact check information when it’s quoted from student activists or other subjects.

“I understand that you’re supposed to present other points of view, but I think that student reporters rely on [officials] because they know that they’ll be able to interview them and will provide more credibility to their story,” said Benson-Williams. “They might just write an article about a crime incident that happened in New Haven, and yet they still will interview a Yale Police Officer for no reason, just because it’s convenient and they have that access.”

Because there isn’t consensus among students about what police accountability and mandatory reporting should look like, student journalists across the country grapple with how to use Clery ethically at their schools. Mike Hiestand, the senior legal council at the Student Press Law Center, said he receives a couple questions from student journalists regarding Clery every week.

“When Clery first came out, there were a lot of loopholes,” Hiestand said. “There was a real reluctance on the part of these schools early on—and I think some of that reluctance continues. To provide information about crime on campus is not a great marketing tool.”

Part of the confusion is that not every school reports their police data in the same way. This is somewhat by design: colleges with on-campus housing have different Clery requirements than those without, for example. Abigail Boyer, the associate executive director of the Clery Center (the organization that provides training and guidance to help universities comply with the Act) said campus culture and size can also play a part in the ways universities might implement police reporting. For example, a cosmetology school that self identifies as operating more like a high school—that is, most staff have a similar position and relationship to their students—might consider all staff to be “campus security authorities,” while larger universities have staff specifically designated to handle campus security who would be expected to report under Clery.

Still, some schools Boyer works with have felt that requirements could be clearer. In October of last year, the Department of Education rescinded the handbook outlining how universities can act in compliance with Clery, replacing it with a much shorter document. The original handbook provided examples and practical applications for Clery, giving recommendations specifically for places like technical schools and describing locations like off campus athletic complexes as spaces that need to be reported on.

With the handbook now rescinded, Boyer said it’s common for universities to reach out to the Center with questions, often about whether they can continue practices outlined in the old guidelines. The Clery Center encourages universities to choose to continue or discontinue practices not because the law prescribes it, but because they have policies and values that support them.

The schools echo journalists, student and professional, in this regard, where precedent and official statements often have an outsized impact on coverage. Like Benson-Williams, last year, writers at The New Republic and The Columbia Journalism Review criticized the way news organizations used police statements during anti-police protests of that summer. Alex Shephard of TNR wrote that the common journalistic practice of treating police reports, particularly of protest, as objective truth “turns journalism into a tool to be used in the oppression of others.” This, he wrote, is exacerbated in places like local outlets, where there may be fewer journalists covering a story. College papers might be the perfect example of that hyper-local, community-centered media.

And while college newspapers may simply be following the professional media’s precedent, they already break some of those journalistic norms. Student reporters sometimes include trigger warnings and use gender-neutral language that’s yet to be adopted by mainstream media. Some even report on their staff demographics as a mode of accountability. To take an apolitical example, student newspapers include an alumnus’ graduating year after their name (“Charles Whitaker (Medill ’80, ’81)”). While small, the practice shows that we make choices with our reader, and our subject’s positionalities, in mind. To uncritically relay a police force’s word is also a choice.

The inner workings of college campuses, while obviously not existing in a vacuum, are often inaccessible to the outside world. What happens on campus often only receives media attention through the student papers; they are uniquely poised to report on their police forces. But a newspaper isn’t a community bulletin board. While it can and should report on the statistics police provide, offering the information without much comment or critique provides little value (especially when that information is already required and available for all students to view).

Considerable editorial discretion already exists in campus crime reporting. Jung told me he filters out any cases referred to outside agencies such as LAPD or those marked as “victim not desirous of report.” DeGroot said that crime reporters select around eight incidents per issue, and The Hatchet avoids reporting on liquor and drug law violations or any of the most common crimes in their Log because “there probably isn’t too much to the story.” By this logic, that cases can be omitted for their lack of value to the readership or out of respect for a fellow student, shouldn’t the ones that couldn’t be fact-checked, for any reason, be left out, too?

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