Madeline Buckley and Margaret Fosmoe, South Bend Tribune

SOUTH BEND -- In October 2010, University of Notre Dame junior Declan Sullivan died when the scissor lift on which he was filming a football team practice fell to the ground.

Three years later, Mark Ellsworth, hired as part of a crew to cut down trees to make way for a new campus parking lot, was killed by a falling tree.

Last weekend, a man was critically injured when he fell down a stairwell in the university's Main Building.

In all three cases, Notre Dame Security Police, an authorized police force under Indiana law, investigated. Yet there were no police reports made available and the three cases never showed up on the campus police log.

As mandated by the federal Clery Act, Notre Dame Security Police keeps a log of criminal incidents reported on campus. The Clery Act requires all colleges that participate in federal financial aid programs keep a record and disclose to the public information about certain crimes on and near their campuses.

But Notre Dame officials say the campus police force has no legal obligation to provide a log of accidents and other non-criminal incidents the department investigates.

The holes in the university's incident log raise the question: Should a fully certified police force be subject to Indiana's public records laws?

Meanwhile, other private universities and colleges in Indiana that have authorized police forces vary wildly in how those departments keep incident logs.