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All colleges and universities owe some level of care and have a duty to keep students reasonably safe while attending school and residing on campus. Colleges and universities have to plan and take proactive initiatives to minimize the incidence of violent crimes and student injury and harm resulting from college campus safety and security-related issues. This includes properly reporting and being fully transparent about the types of crimes that occur on campus, tracking who is being impacted, and taking action reasonably calculated to address and minimize the likelihood of incidents that can affect the safety and well-being of students on campus. 

Providing university and college campus safety and security is an inherently difficult task because of the age of the students, campus size and location, the availability of drugs and alcohol, and the existence of multiple buildings on and off campuses, including residential facilities. University administration, public safety directors, and campus police chiefs have a duty to be diligent in their attempts to mitigate risks in areas where incidents tend to occur with regularity and to comply with legal obligations related to college campus safety and security. This includes keeping accurate crime statistics, conducting timely reporting, producing and disseminating annual reports (as required by the Clery Act of 1990), and promoting awareness and providing training to university employees and students.  

College Campus Safety and Security: Protection of Students from Violent Crimes

The Clery Act has two primary goals: to ensure that students, prospective students, parents, and employees have access to accurate information about on-campus crime and security procedures; and to ensure that they receive warnings of an impending threat or security issue that could result in student harm or death. The Clery Act includes crime-data collection and reporting requirements that are essential for spotting trends and repeated violations and for identifying high-risk areas of campus. Appropriate involvement, initiatives, and action by university campus risk-management teams are especially important for upholding the intent of the act; failure to act or to mitigate known and repeated risks that can foreseeably lead to student harm may result in lawsuits against the college or university by students who can show that the institution was negligent and failed to keep its campus and students safe. 

Crime categories covered by the Clery Act’s reporting requirements include:

• Criminal offenses – Criminal homicide (murder and non-negligent manslaughter, manslaughter by negligence), sexual assault (rape, fondling, incest, statutory rape), robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, arson
• Hate crimes – Any of the above-mentioned offenses, and any incidents of larceny-theft, simple assault, intimidation, destruction/damage/vandalism of property
• Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) offenses – Domestic violence, dating violence, stalking
• Arrests and referrals for disciplinary action – Weapons law violations, drug-abuse violations, liquor law violations (Clery Center, n.d.).

These categories include situations in which students are severely injured or die as a result of fights at parties, overconsumption of drugs and/or alcohol, the presence of intruders and trespassers, and active shooters. It is also important to note that Clery Act requirements are not limited to events that occur on campus or within campus buildings and residences, but also crimes that occur on public property within campus grounds or immediately adjacent to the campus, non-campus buildings and property owned or controlled by the institution and used for educational purposes and frequented by students, or facilities controlled by student organizations that are officially recognized by an institution (Clery Center, n.d.). Not all potentially harmful situations can be eliminated or resolved with Clery Act compliance and reporting; however, the process provides important information — and notice — to colleges and universities about college campus safety and security risks requiring mitigation. Additionally, the provision of timely alerts, warnings, and emergency notifications can help to protect students and employees from potentially unsafe and dangerous situations.

Crime Prevention Policy and Transparency for College Campus Safety and Security

Importantly, colleges and universities are required to use Clery Act data to determine how they can proactively reduce the threat of violent crime on campus. The act came about in 1990 when Congress passed the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act (CACSA) amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA). Amendments to CACSA in 1998 closed some loopholes and renamed the law the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (the Clery Act) in memory of a student who was raped and murdered in her dorm room. Various amendments of the act over the years included crucial provisions, such as requirements that campus safety departments include statistics related to certain criminal offenses in their annual reports, language indicating that crime reports are not confidential education records, and clarification that federal privacy protections regarding student records do not extend to campus courts’ conclusions and disciplinary actions in cases of violent crimes or sexual assaults.

College Campus Safety and Security: Higher Education Act and Clery Act Requirements Overview

The list below provides a brief overview of the basic requirements of the Clery Act and other HEA college campus safety and security-related reporting requirements. The requirements fall into three categories based on the makeup of the college or university: 1) Clery Act crime statistics and security-related policy requirements that must be met by every institution; 2) A crime log requirement for institutions that have a campus police or security department; and 3) Requirements for missing-student notifications and fire safety for institutions that have at least one on-campus facility that houses students. These requirements complement and support the development, testing, and practice of high-quality emergency operations plans that clearly delineate individual responsibilities during an emergency response. These requirements also point to the need to develop and implement notification and communication strategies for sharing information with the campus community, and the importance of keeping the community informed of current college campus safety and security policies and procedures.

Required for every institution

• Collect, classify, and count crime reports and crime statistics

• Issue campus alerts and a timely warning for any Clery Act crime that represents an ongoing threat to the safety of students or employees

• Issue an emergency notification upon the confirmation of a significant emergency or dangerous situation involving an immediate threat to the health or safety of students or employees occurring on campus

• Provide educational programs and campaigns to promote awareness of dating violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking

• Have procedures for institutional disciplinary action in cases of dating violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking

• Publish an annual security report by October 1 containing safety and security-related policy statements and crime statistics and distribute it to all current students and employees

• Submit crime statistics to the United States Department of Education

Required if institution maintains campus police or security

• Keep a daily log of alleged criminal incidents that is open to public inspection

Required if the institution has any on-campus student housing facilities

• Disclose missing-student notification procedures that pertain to students residing in those facilities

• Disclose fire-safety information related to those facilities

• Keep a fire log that is open to public inspection

• Publish an annual fire-safety report containing policy statements, as well as fire statistics associated with each on-campus student housing facility, including the number of fires, cause of fires, injuries, deaths, and property damage; and inform prospective students and employees about the availability of the report

• Submit fire statistics to the United States Department of Education each fall in the web-based data collection

Non-Compliance with The Clery Act Results in Violation Fines

Colleges and universities receiving federal funding have a moral, legal, and financial duty to comply with the above requirements. Failure to comply could result in violent crimes that may even lead to death. In 1986, Jeanne Clery, whom the act is named, began attending Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Another student raped and murdered Jeanne in her dormitory room on campus. An investigation revealed that in the three years prior to Jeanne’s murder, 38 violent felony crimes had occurred on or near the Lehigh campus that went largely unannounced. In addition to facing liabilities associated with student injury or death, if a college or university is found in violation of the Clery Act, the United States Department of Education (USDOE) has the right to issue fines. As of April 20, 2022, the minimum fine per violation was $62,689. 

In 2008, the USDOE fined Eastern Michigan University $350,000 for failing to warn the campus community about the murder of student Laura Dickinson in her on-campus residence hall in December of 2006, along with numerous other college campus safety and security violations. In 2016, the USDOE fined Penn State University $2.4 million for failing to notify students about Jerry Sandusky, an assistant football coach who was charged with sex abuse and for failing to disclose other campus crimes. Another example of fines for noncompliance with the Clery Act occurred at the University of California–Berkeley, where the USDOE completed a review of the university’s compliance during the period of 2009–2016. The review found that 1,125 incidents out of 32,000 records were misclassified resulting in possible underreporting of crime statistics. As a result, the University and the USDOE reached a settlement under which the campus will pay $2.35 million for violations.

In summary, the spirit of the Clery Act is that knowledge is power. The act promotes campus safety and transparency by ensuring that students, employees, parents, prospective parents, and the broader community are informed about important information regarding college campus safety and security. By having this information, families can make informed decisions about what schools they should consider for their children. Moreover, colleges and universities can look at the data and determine how they can proactively reduce foreseeable risks and the number of violent crimes on their campuses. This approach not only protects students but also helps avoid unnecessary fines and costly litigation. 

Our experts are available for a complimentary call to discuss matters involving institutions of higher education and liability related to the Clery Act non-compliance and college campus safety and security risks. In our next article, we will look at the crime reporting geography associated with the reporting requirements and the relationship between the Clery Act and Title IX.

References

Clery Center. (n.d.). The Jeanne Clery Act. https://www.clerycenter.org/the-clery-act#:~:text=The%20Clery%20Act%20requires%20colleges,place%20to%20improve%20campus%20safety