When Congress first enacted what would become the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act) in 1990 a new era in campus public safety was ushered in. While, like all communities, campuses were affected by crimes – especially gender-based violence and substance abuse – these issues largely weren’t widely addressed. The Clery Act changed that forever, but this was merely the first step in making campuses safer.
Compliance with the various consumer information disclosures – crime statistics, security policy summaries, and day-to-day safety information – is important but should only be the tip of the iceberg. This work affords us the opportunity to go beyond merely meeting federal bureaucratic requirements and create a comprehensive campus safety framework. In order to accomplish this we must reframe this as a holistic opportunity rather than merely a federal bureaucratic check-box.
The biggest day-to-day impact of the Act belongs to the public crime log, timely warning, and emergency notification requirements rather than the Annual Security and Fire Safety Report (ASFR) due by each October 1st. The ASFR, however, still offers critical information to campus community members who need to explore policy issues and historical statistical information, but perhaps even more importantly it creates the opportunity to develop a comprehensive, multidisciplinary campus safety framework.
Collecting crime statistics still provides useful historical information to members of the campus community as well as providing an important metric for campus decisionmakers. Because the Clery Act encompasses reports from a wide array of campus officials it also requires a multidisciplinary effort to collect, count, and classify them. These open lines of communication rather than working in silos are a key foundation of any comprehensive approach to campus safety, if not the single most essential element.
Officials can more readily identify the needs of community members reporting that they’ve been the victim of a crime or an emergency when the various offices responsible for responding are on the same page. Because meeting timely warning standards effectively requires an ongoing collection of this information rather than just an end of year data dump it is also possible to identify trends much more quickly across offices and effectively respond and mitigate them.
Although best known for including three years worth of crime statistics, typically the bulk of ASFRs are devoted to covering what are officially known as policy statements addressing specific areas related to campus safety. These are intended to be summaries of larger, official policies existing at various places across an institution. As much of this information may remain the same or similar from year-to-year collecting it should require less day-to-day work than statistics, but keeping it up-to-date is essential to both compliance and establishing a multidisciplinary campus safety framework.
The Clery Act requires institutions to address a wide array of campus safety policies including reporting crimes and emergencies, building security policies, the authority of campus public safety, alcohol and other drugs, and sexual violence. Some like building security merely require that an institution disclose what they do while others like sexual violence prescribe specific standards that must be met.
While most often seen as a consumer information disclosure, or meeting a bureaucratic check-box, properly creating an ASFR has evolved into a process requiring that institutions of higher education formally establish the underlying policies and procedures as well as consolidate disparate policies across campus. As with the statistics doing so requires multidisciplinary coordination. Optimally this is done with the support of an institution’s senior leadership further cementing the ASFR as a framework for campus safety by raising its prioritization.
Along with this intrinsic value of meeting Clery Act requirements we also can’t ignore the original intent of the law – ensuring that prospective and current students and employees are empowered to make informed decisions about their own safety. Putting significant effort into posting a 100 page or more ASFR that few students and employees will read may be compliant but alone it doesn’t meet the spirit of the law. It is also important that institutions get the maximum return on all the hard work put in creating this material. What is disclosed must be accurate, concise, and accessible.
Campus safety is a shared responsibility involving officials, students, employees, and local stakeholders. Empowering these constituencies requires more than a once a year notice about the availability of the ASFR. Otherwise it is easy to see why this may be looked at as a bureaucratic exercise alone.
Public outreach campaigns, some of which are already required by law (alcohol and other drugs, sexual violence, and emergency management), are the essential next step to maximize return on the investment in keeping campuses safe by fully engaging all constituency groups. This is what we owe our campus communities, not a bureaucratic check-box.
