The sponsors of House Bill 1022 insist they want private universities in Indiana to be more open with police records. The bill, they say, will create a new and stronger level of transparency. And the universities themselves, who helped craft the bill, have said they want to be more open when it comes to public safety.
The bill comes in the wake of controversies about sexual assault investigations on university campuses, as well as a lawsuit by media giant ESPN on whether police records by the University of Notre Dame should be public.
So would the bill really meet the bar its proponents tout? How much more open will the records of police forces at Indiana’s private universities really be?
In the case of one key player, Notre Dame, the answer apparently is not much more at all.
The Notre Dame Security Police department handles hundreds of calls, complaints and cases each year. But of all those, House Bill 1022 would apply to a relatively small number.
That’s because the bill does not hold private universities to the same standard as municipal police departments. It limits what information would need to be publicly released only to incidents that result in arrests or incarcerations for criminal offenses.
At Notre Dame over the past two years, the total number of arrests was 126 — or about 60 per year, according to university spokesman Dennis Brown. That represents just a fraction of incidents handled by Notre Dame police. In 2015 alone, nearly 1,300 cases were listed on the university police crime log.
What kinds of incidents would be exempt from the proposed law? In recent years at the university, for example, a student died when the scissor lift on which he was filming a football practice fell to the ground; a man on a crew cutting down trees on campus was killed by a falling tree; and a man was critically injured when he fell down a stairwell in the university’s Main Building.