Campus crime in Georgia

By Laurie Lattimore-Volkmann

     Nov. 23, 2005, Atlanta -- There were nine crimes committed on the Macon campus of Mercer University in 2004, primarily burglaries and auto theft, plus one report of sexual assault. There were also 54 liquor law violations, one drug violation and two weapons violations.

     But thanks to a court ruling early last spring, private universities like Mercer and eight other Georgia schools with campus police departments no longer have to disclose such crime information if it occurs on – or even near – their campuses.  “The one place in the whole state you don’t have protection from the Open Records Act is on a college campus,” said Sen. David Adelman (D-Decatur) who will try to change that practice in the 2006 legislative session. “Victims can’t get incident reports and no one has access to information about crime statistics on campus.”

     The exemption for private schools releasing public documents related to crimes on or near their campuses came out of a 2003 lawsuit against Mercer University police.

Attorney Amanda Farahaney filed the suit after a former Mercer student was denied access to records about a sexual assault charge she had filed while in school.

The state superior court ruled in favor of the student, saying the documents were public records since the police were acting as a government agency.

     The Georgia Court of Appeals overturned that decision in February 2005, finding that since  Mercer University officers were not being paid by the state to perform government work, technically, their records were private.  “It was a technical defect in the law that needs to be corrected,” said Carolyn Carlson, a political science professor at Georgia State who serves on the national Freedom of Information committee for the Society of Professional Journalists.

     In fact, the appeals court did make it clear in the decision that the Open Records Act should be amended so that private campus police records do fall under its purview.

And Sen. Adelman is more than happy to be the catalyst for that change. He will again introduce SB 153 to make college crime records open on all Georgia campuses, regardless of public or private. 

     “The law is very narrow; we’re just closing a loophole,” Adelman said of the bill.  SB 153 passed unanimously in the Senate last year but ran out of time in the House before the session ended. Both Adelman and Carlson believe the bill will make it during the 2006 session.  “We made it to the one yard line, but sometimes punching it over the goal is the hardest part,” Adelman said. “So we’ve got to work hard to educate the state.”

     Part of the state is still resisting – most notably officials at Mercer as well as Savannah College of Art and Design.  Mercer officials refused to talk with Georgia FOI Access, but a spokesperson for the Georgia Foundation for Independent Colleges and Universities has said the group agrees with Mercer’s position that all records at a private school should remain closed – even if the records relate to crimes handled on or near campus. Keeping such information private would prevent disclosure of incident reports as well as compiled annual reports about crimes that have been committed.

But some private school officials have come out in support of the measure. Officials at Emory, which is in Adelman’s district, testified before the House judiciary committee las year in favor of SB 153.

     Steve Senser, deputy general counsel for Emory, noted that as long as the bill fell in line with the federal student privacy law, Emory supported the change in the law. The federal student privacy law does have an exemption for law enforcement records, which explicity states they are open to the public. 

     Adelman acknowledges that disclosure of public records is time-consuming for government bodies.  “The Open Records Act is inconvenient – no one can dispute that,” Adelman said. “And the fact of the matter is that if inconvenience were the test, we wouldn’t have any open records.  “But the burden of inconvenience far outweighs not having information about crime on our college campuses available for public review.”