Is The Campus Policing System Failing Students?

There’s a lot to learn from UVA - Jackie’s story with Phi Kappa Psi, missing student Hannah Graham, the brutal murder of Yeardley Love - a culture on campus in which violence and sexual assaults are taken with a soft-handed approach. In each case at UVA, and across campuses nationwide, there is political as well as financial pressure for the campus police and administration to downplay or cover-up crimes committed on or by students either on campus or off.

Jackie’s story recently recounted in a Rolling Stone article uncovered a broken system that fails victims and aids attackers. Students are calling for Dean Eramo to be fired for her role in keeping sexual assaults within campus authority rather than reporting them directly to the local police department. Since the story was published, many more UVA students and alumni have come forward with similar stories. It’s been brought to light that even when assaults are kept within campus authority, punishments are weak, or non-existent. Not a single student has been expelled for sexual assault violence at UVA.

*Edit: There has been some speculation behind the validity of the Rolling Stone article recently. However, even if Rolling Stone was embellishing, doesn't negate the fact that there's an evident issue with the campus policing system with the number of women who have come forward with similar stories at UVA.

Hannah Graham

When violence has taken place off campus, the system still fails. Recently missing UVA student Hannah Graham, whose remains were later found at an abandoned property in Virginia, typifies how unreported, unshared, and undocumented crimes on other campuses (in the same state) allowed alleged serial rapist, Jesse Leroy Matthew, Jr., to continue in his wrath. In 2002 when Matthew was attending Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA he was questioned in connection with a sexual assault, but charges were not filed. Then, in 2003 (11 months later) he was involved in another sexual assault investigation at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA. Again no charges were filed, and Matthew left the school. Now, in addition to being charged for Hannah’s abduction and death, Matthew has been charged with rape, abduction, and attempted capital murder in a 2005 case of a woman in Fairfax County, VA. He has also since been linked to the death of Morgan Harrington who was last seen at a concert on the UVA campus in 2009.

Morgan Harrington

If these alleged assaults had happened off campus and recorded by a police agency, would have things proceeded differently? Would Jesse Leroy Matthew already have been in jail?

Yeardley Love

In 2010, Yeardley Love was murdered by former romantic interest George Huguley. Like Matthew, Huguley had found trouble at another college campus in Virginia, Washington and Lee University, before murdering Love in 2008. At W&L he had been arrested by Lexington (VA) Police Department for public drunkenness and resisting arrest outside of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity house located on campus. Police had to tase him in order to subdue him. His arrest was never reported to UVA by Washington and Lee, Lexington Police, or Huguley himself (Huguley was required to do so, but didn’t) which lead to Love being brutally beat to death in an off campus residence weeks before graduation.

What’s most surprising and confusing to find is that many campus and local jurisdictional police don’t communicate at all. At UPenn in Philly, the Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush was quoted in a recent article about campus crime mapping that “Not every university is able to get crime data from the police department in its city”. After the disappearance of Kristin Smart from the San Luis Obispo Cal Poly campus, California passed a law compelling local police and publicly funded campuses to have agreements about reporting cases involving or possibly involving violence against students. This occurred because the last person seen with Kristin had attempted to climb up second-story balcony possibly to break into a coed’s apartment.

Kristin Smart

Why is there a lapse information sharing to begin with? Withholding information is not conducive to creating a safe (campus) environment.

All three UVA victims will eventually receive justice, but justice will not be served to future victims (not only at UVA, but campuses nationwide) if the system isn’t changed. In other words, we are not learning anything from these cases.

A solution could be to remove the campus police entirely, replacing it with local police to create a system of checks and balances with administration and police departments. However, Florida State Football and the Tallahassee police department may have proved this isn’t a foolproof idea. The financial motivation to feed a football program exists further than simply with campus administration especially when the city reaps benefits of economic incentives brought forth by the NCAA Division One National Championship football team. Arrests of FSU football players for crimes ranging from domestic violence to criminal mischief to thefts to burglaries and even a shooting (with a BB gun) have been avoided, stalled (see: Heisman trophy recipient and FSU quarterback Jameis Winston), or dropped.

The NY Times article titled ‘Florida State Football Casts Shadow of Tallahassee Justice’ covers this very point - crimes committed by members of the FSU football team that go unpunished - citing that FSU administration and boosters, city economics, the TPD are all intertwined. FSU isn't the only school that can be picked on - the Penn State Football sexual abuse scandal isn't too far behind us.

No one wants a bad decision they make in college to affect them for the rest of their life. But if there are no consequences to actions, what’s to stop someone from doing them to begin with?

The Jeanne Clery Act requires the disclosure of campus security policy and crime statistics. It was created for good reason. Jeanne Clery was brutally raped and murdered in her campus residence in 1986 by a fellow student who had a history of documented violence to his peers. The Clery Act was enacted in 1990, but it doesn’t appear to be working well at all. This year it was announced that 55 schools are under investigation for Title IX and Clery Act complaints. Now, almost 25 years later, we are still failing victims of crimes that could have been prevented with proper enforcement of the Clery Act. It’s possible Matthew, Huguley, and FSU Football players would not have had the chance to become offenders if the system didn’t encourage and enable their violent behavior.

So, what is the solution?

Three things need to happen.

1 - Campus culture needs to change. Students need to be held accountable for their actions. If you can be expelled for cheating on an exam, you should definitely be expelled for sexually assaulting another student.

2 - More information needs to be shared openly and frequently, not only across jurisdictional borders within police departments, but with the public as well. Clery reports are not enough. The alleged quote from Dean Earmo at UVA ‘No one wants to send their daughter to the rape school’ is a misguided mindset and downright frightening to hear. In addition to monthly and yearly summaries, daily and year-to-date information should be released and analyzed regularly.

3 - A new system needs to be installed to remove political and financial pressures for college authorities to look the other way. Replacing all campus police forces with a contingent of local police could work if the local police chief believed in the rule-of-law and not buckle to the political forces demanding they look the other way to protect one of the area’s biggest employers.