Marissa A Widdison and Professor Joel Campbell, Communications

On April 5, 1986, 19-year-old Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her residence hall room at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. The crime was opportunistic and random; Clery’s bedroom was unlocked and the perpetrator was another student whom she didn’t know. After her murder, Jeanne’s parents discovered that students and parents hadn’t been told about nearly 40 violent crimes that happened at Lehigh in the three years before the murder. Disturbed by the ignorance that contributed to their daughter’s death, the Clery’s — along with other campus crime victims — persuaded Congress to create the “Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990.” It has since been revised and renamed in memory of Jeanne Clery. This federal law requires all public and private institutions of post-secondary education participating in federal student aid programs (which includes BYU) to disclose certain crime information to college students and faculty. If colleges are found out of compliance with the act, they can be fined by the U.S. Department of Education.

In November 2001, students from BYU-Hawaii filed a complaint with Security On Campus, the nonprofit organization responsible for being a watchdog for the Clery Act. BYU-Hawaii students claimed that the school was out of compliance. Their main complaints concerned two of the sub-requirements of the Clery Act: the police station was not keeping a daily public log of crime statistics, and the annual crime report was not properly being sent out to students and faculty. After an audit was conducted, BYU-Hawaii was found to be out of compliance with the Clery Act. They underwent training and, after improvements were made, fines were rescinded.

Because the BYU campuses Hawaii and Utah are sister schools, the BYU-Hawaii situation brought up questions about compliance at BYU-Utah. Does BYU-Utah (hereafter referred to as BYU) meet the requirements of the Clery Act? If it does fulfill the requirements of the letter of the law, does BYU also fulfill the spirit of the law — to inform students about crime in the area so that those students can make wise safety decisions? How does BYU fulfill the Clery Act requirements? The purpose of my honors thesis is to answer these questions in a thorough and professional manner.

I hypothesized that BYU is compliant with the letter of the Jeanne Clery Act, and will already be fulfilling the sub-requirements as outlined in the act. However, I also hypothesized that students will not be aware of the crime rate around campus, and improvements could be made to more fully comply with the spirit of the law. Finally, a guiding research question was used to direct the final part of my research: could The Daily Universe be used as an efficient way to reach maximum compliance with both the spirit and letter of the Jeanne Clery Act?

The research was completed in two phases. The first phase determined the extent to which BYU complied with the letter as well as the spirit of the Clery Act. The second phase determined what improvements could be made to reach full compliance.

Phase One:

To evaluate how compliant BYU is with the letter of the law, I contacted Security On Campus representative Dan Carter, who helped me create a list of Clery Act requirements that applied to BYU. I then spoke with Capt. Mike Harroun of the BYU Police Department to determine if/how those requirements were being fulfilled.

Overall, BYU was compliant with the letter of the Clery Act, although specific weaknesses existed here and there. The annual crime report is released to the student body consistently via an emailed link, and provides in-depth information about all of the required sections of information. A public log exists that is accessible to the public. Finally, timely warning notices are released, although this seems to be one of the weaker areas of compliance.

To evaluate how compliant BYU is with the letter of the Act, a sampling of the student population was surveyed to see if they were aware of the crime rate in Provo. To complete this, I first requested crime statistics form the Provo Police Department for the 2003 calendar year. Then a survey was created, approved by the IRB, and distributed to a random cluster sampling of 400 BYU students living both on and off campus. Finally, the data was gathered and analyzed using SPSS statistical software. For this stage of research, I enlisted the help of a group of students who were in Professor Irene Adams’ communications 319 (media research) class.

The results indicate that students underestimate the number of sexual assaults in Provo, although they overestimate how many sexual assaults occur on BYU campus. Also, students overestimate the number of robberies in Provo, but severely underestimate the number of burglaries. Finally, students underestimate the number of vehicle thefts in Provo.

Phase Two:

After these results were collected, I turned to my guiding research question: could the Universe be used to better educate students about the crime rate? I am currently finishing this last phase of research. I have already interviewed Amelia Nielsen-Stowell, editor-in-chief of the Universe, to work out the logistics of starting a periodic crime page. I then contacted Capt. Harroun to discuss how the page could be as non-sensationalistic, ethical, and responsible as possible. Finally, I worked with the Universe copy desk and designers to design a prototype template for a crime page. The finishing touches are still being applied to this crime page, which may begin running in Winter or Fall semester 2005 newspapers.

In conclusion, although my hypothesis accurately predicted the general direction of the results, there were a few unexpected twists and turns in the details. Perhaps the most significant single discovery was that my underlying assumptions about BYUPD and the Universe were incorrect. I assumed that any shortcomings in compliance with the spirit of the law would be because BYUPD did not want to release information, and that the best way to reach fuller compliance would be for reporters to unearth more campus information for the weekly Campus Police Beat. Instead, I found that the BYUPD was more than willing to work with reporters in releasing information, and the most effective improvements could be made by Universe reporters instead working with Provo police to establish a Provo Police Beat in addition to the campus crime information.