Brown University’s lawsuit highlights the issue of police transparency at private universities

RI (AP) Providence – A new lawsuit against Brown University has updated questions surrounding the secret.

Unlike public campuses, private institutions of higher education are rarely exempt from disclosing arrest records, incident reports, or other documents, even when they use officers who have the authority to bind students and sometimes force. This lack of transparency has long raised objections from Watchdog Groups and government advocates who say such records are important to keep law enforcement accountable.

In a recently filed legal challenge, the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island hopes to create a dent in its practice by insisting that the Brown Police Department should comply with the state’s public record laws.

“Police officers at these private universities have the same arrest, detention and other authority that other police officers have in the state where other officers work in the city or town,” said Stephen Brown, ACLU Executive Director of Rhode Island. “In light of that fact, I think they should be treated the same way as civil servants.”

So far, Brown had refused to comment on the lawsuit, but their lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

State law, court issues rarely result in more access

According to the Student Publishing Center, Connecticut, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Ohio, Texas and Virginia are just a handful of states where private agency police departments are subject to public record law. The rest is primarily exempted. In Massachusetts, the state Supreme Court explicitly ruled that Harvard University’s campus police were private universities and therefore were not subject to the state’s public records laws.

In Brown, the ACLU represents two journalists, both denying requests for public records to be made to report an arrest by Brown officials. The ACLU claims that Brown’s campus police operates under the power of the state-sanctioned police, which is subject to Rhode Island’s Public Records Act.

Both reporters were former Brown students who wrote for an independent university newspaper, and the other reporter for a reporter for a motif magazine, who filed a complaint with the state in hoping to sue their denial. However, the state Attorney General’s Office has issued an opinion with Brown Police.

“Whenever people are arrested and criminally charged, state law gives the public, and therefore the press acts on behalf of the people — giving the police the right and duty to know what they are doing in their names,” said Michael Billow, plaintiff in the case and reporter for Motif Magazine.

“If the public and the press can’t use the power of the law to find out what the police are doing, what you’re done is the secret police,” he added.

However, even when accessing public records on private campuses is difficult, these schools are subject to federal disclosure requirements regarding crime data.

Under the Clery Act, universities and universities that receive federal funding are required to collect data on campus crimes and notify students of threats. This is something that both private and public schools accept. Schools should disseminate their annual security reports, including crime reports and information on efforts to improve campus safety.

These reports provide public safety information on campus, but are not always comprehensive. Last year, Liberty University agreed to pay an unprecedented $14 million fine to the U.S. Department of Education for not disclosing information about crime on campus.

Former executives, students join the phone in search of more transparency

One former Brown police officer who worked in the department for 18 years said he became increasingly uneasy about the culture he observed. Michael Greco has witnessed police prioritizing limiting negative attention about schools, saying that fellow officers often refer to the “Queen’s Army” dedicated to keeping police stations within a “brown bubble.”

“It all revolved around this loophole in the law that Brown is a private agency with police authority,” he said. “Then they can take what should be a public record and turn it into a private record. That seems to have been our main goal.”

Greco recalled an incident in 2021 when he and his fellow colleagues were instructed not to use radio when dealing with possible bomb threats on campus where someone was threatening to “shoot police officers.” Greco said the department would not want to monitor the radio and warn Providence police in response to such cases.

The bomb and shooter ultimately became false alarms, but Greco says the leadership was unfortunate how he later explained the incident in a report summarizing the event. Greco then left the department and filed a worker’s claim for compensation against Brown after developing post-traumatic stress disorder, which he says he began experiencing after the 2021 incident. The case has been resolved, according to court documents.

Greco has publicly called for more changes within Brown University, including testifying in support of changing state laws before Brown University to make universities like Brown eligible for public records laws.

“I think there should be public pressure to change this,” he said. “They should be detained at least to the same standards as public police departments.”

Similar concerns are shared by some students who have seen university campuses handle the famous protests and work under President Donald Trump’s administration.

“I think there’s more transparency needed when there’s disagreement nationwide about what’s going on with these arrests on campus, especially when a lot of people don’t know what’s going on with a higher ED and what it does.”