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Student Log-in
By Chelsea Boozer
University of Memphis
An audit conducted by the Department of Education found that University of Memphis might be in violation of four parts of a federal law requiring all colleges and universities that receive federal funding to disclose information about crime on and around campus.
The law, known as the Clery Act, is meant to protect the campus community by informing it of potentially dangerous situations in a timely manner.
The University's department of legal counsel has until Friday to respond to the allegations, which resulted from a 2010 audit. The University was notified of the findings in August of this year. They are not yet considered violations of the Clery Act.
The DOE will further review the matter after a University response to the allegations.
According to U of M associate counsel Melanie Murry, the University doesn't agree with all of the findings. She declined to comment further until the University files its official response on Friday.
Read the whole story here.
The Clery Act and why it was implemented
In 1986, a 19-year-old Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered by another student while asleep in her residence hall at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. After her death, Clery’s parents learned there had been 38 violent crimes on campus in the three previous years.
The Clerys understood that if universities reported crimes on campus, students would have a better sense of if and where they are safe. Ironically, they had chosen Lehigh University for their daughter after deciding Tulane University in New Orleans was too dangerous.
As a result of Jeanne Clery’s death, the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990 was established. It is now more commonly known as the Clery Act.
The act requires, among other things, that schools make timely warnings about crimes that pose an ongoing threat to the campus community. It also requires that schools make public an annual crime and safety report and a daily up-to-date crime log.
Victim says unreported crimes give students false sense of safety
Arthur Hsiao, a sophomore at The U of M, was inside his second floor Brister Square apartment just off campus at 11 p.m. on Oct. 13, a Thursday night.
The door was cracked slightly, letting in the hallway breeze, when Hsiao turned from his computer and saw two males in ski masks coming through his door pointing guns at him.
“Get down on the ground,” one said. “Where’s the bitch?”
They were referring to Hsiao’s roommate’s cousin, who was just with Hsiao and his roommate in the parking lot outside.
“She’s not here,” Hsiao replied worriedly as the intruders proceeded to coax Hsiao’s roommate from a back bedroom at gunpoint, forcing him to the ground next to Hsiao.
For about ten minutes, Hsiao and his roommate, also a U of M student, lied there replying to the men’s demands.
“Where is your phone and wallet?”
“Where’s the bitch?”
“Nice Mac laptop...”
When Hsiao said, “Please don’t hurt me,” one of the still unknown suspects pistol-whipped him in the head.
Hsiao said that the men then beat him and his roommate by either kicking them or striking them in the head with a gun. They enjoyed it and were calm, Hsiao said.
After taking a laptop, iPhones, beer and other personal effects, the men told Hsiao and his roommate that if they got up or called the cops, they would come back and kill them.
Hsiao and his roommate moved out of the apartment complex, where they had lived for two years, shortly after the robbery.
“For me, for some reason, I don’t believe that these things would happen to me,” said Hsiao, who is from Taiwan. “Now I feel like, creepy around campus. I was freaking out because of the shooting (on Spottswood on Tuesday.)”
Hsiao said he had never heard that the area was unsafe, and he wasn’t aware of several reported break-ins nearby, he said.
“I had no idea and people are still moving there. After I moved in, I noticed there are so many robberies and stuff happen like four or five times a semester,” he said. “I read in The Helmsman that U of M was reported as the safest campus in Tennessee, and I think it’s not true.”
Hsiao said he considers the area he lives in a part of campus – University owned property including fraternity houses and student ministries are located in the area – though he knows it is technically not.
“I think police’s definition of ‘off campus’ is a little ridiculous,” Hsiao said. “Yeah, it’s off campus, but it all happens to U of M students right by the school.”
Hsiao said police should report crimes that happen to students near campus because it lets students know if they need to be cautious or if they can feel safe.
“Every year a lot of freshman come from everywhere in the states and they have no idea about this school and where is the safe spot because police don’t report and students have no sense of what its like,” he said.
Bruce Harber, U of M Police Services director of public safety, said that it is important to report crimes not only for the safety of The University, but for the safety of its students.
“We’ve got to make sure the surrounding area is just as safe as campus,” he said. “The future depends on the areas around us. We need to fix it as quickly as we can.”
U of M Police Services is required by a federal law known as the Clery Act to disclose information about crime on and around campus.
The law is meant to protect the campus community by informing it of potentially dangerous situations in a timely manner.
Police don’t have to disclose near-campus crime statistics in their annual report, however the act does require them to report those crimes that occur adjacent to campus in a daily crime log.
Those asking for access to the crime log, which is public to anyone, have instead been deferred to a book of incident reports.
When this was brought to Harber’s attention, he let his employees know that in the future, the crime log needed to be provided instead of the book of incident reports.
As of Tuesday, the incident report book had not been updated in seven days.
In weeks prior to that, Daily Helmsman reporters seeking information on campus crime were told the book and online log had not been updated because the staffer responsible for doing so was off work that week.
The online log – not required by law – had no data for the month of November as of late Wednesday night.
Frank LoMonte, executive director of Student Press Law Center, said reporting crime accurately is crucial to students’ safety, even if the crime was adjacent to and not directly on campus.
“Just logging the crime at the police department is not all that helpful because the average citizen never checks the daily blotter, but that’s where vigilant news reporters are truly the eyes and ears of the public,” he said.
Without an updated and accurate daily crime log, students have no way of knowing about the potentially dangerous situations that happen on or near campus unless U of M Police Services reports them to the campus community via an email or TigerText.
