The trial against Brown University is expanding the debate on the secret of campus police in colleges

Providence, RI – A new trial against Brown University has renewed questions surrounding the secret offering many police officers employed by private colleges and universities across the United States

Unlike public campuses, private higher education establishments are largely exempt from disclosing arrest files, incident reports and other documents even as they employ agents who have the power to hold students, as well as, in some cases, the force of use. This lack of transparency has long raised objections from surveillance groups and open government defenders who say that these files are essential to hold responsible police.

In a recently filed legal challenge, the civilian American Liberties Union of the Rhode Island hopes to make a breach in this practice by arguing that the Brown police service should comply with the law on state public files.

“These police officers from private university have the same arrest powers, the powers of detention and other powers that any other policeman has in the state working for a city or a city,” said Steven Brown, executive director of the Aclu of Rhode Island. “We think that in light of this fact, they should be treated in the same way as public police.”

Until now, Brown has refused to comment on the trial, but their lawyers have filed a request for rejection of the prosecution.

Connecticut, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia are only the handful of states where the police of private establishments are subject to the laws on public files, according to the Student Press Law Center. The others are largely exempt. In the Massachusetts, the Supreme State Court explicitly ruled that the Campus Police at the Harvard University was not subject to the laws on open state files because they were a private university.

In Brown, ACLU represents two journalists who both refused their requests for public files to request arrest reports made by Brown officers. The ACLU claims that the Brown campus police operate under police authorized police authorized, which makes them in turn submitted to the law on public archives of Rhode Island.

The two journalists, one of a former brown student who wrote for the newspaper of the independent university and the other journalist of the magazine Mâtre, filed complaints with the State in the hope of appealing their refusal. However, the Office of the State Attorney General published an opinion for the Brown police.

“Whenever people are arrested and accused of criminal, the law of the State gives the public – and therefore the press acting on behalf of the public – the right and the duty to discover what the police do on behalf,” said Michael Bilow, a claimant in the trial and a journalist with a motive magazine.

“If the public and the press cannot discover what the police do using the power of the law, then what you end up with a secret police,” he added.

However, even if access to public documents on private campuses can be difficult, these schools are subject to certain requirements of federal disclosure in terms of crime data.

Under the Clery Act, colleges and universities that receive federal funding are necessary to collect data on campus crime and inform students of threats – something that the majority of private and public schools accept. Schools must disseminate an annual security report which includes reports on crime and information on efforts to improve campus safety.

These reports provide information on public security on their campus, but they are not always complete. Last year, the Liberty University agreed to pay the American Department of Education an unprecedented fine of $ 14 million in part for its inability to disclose information on crimes on its campus.

A former Brown police officer, who served in the department for 18 years, says he has more and more alarmed by the culture he observed. Michael Greco says he has witnessed a police force which favors the limitation of negative attention on the school, noting that colleagues officers often qualify the police service as “the queen army” dedicated to the conservation of information within the “brown bubble”.

“Everything turned around this gap in the law that Brown is a private institution with the powers of the police,” he said. “They can then take what should be a public file and make it a private file. And it seems that it was our main objective. ”

Greeco remembered an incident in 2021 where he and his colleagues were invited not to use radios when they responded to a possible threat of bomb on the campus where someone threatened to “shoot cops”. Greeco said the department did not want to alert the Police from Providence, who monitors the radio and responds to this type of incident.

While the bomb and the shooter ended up being a false alarm, Greco says that leadership was unhappy with the way he described the incident later in his report summarizing the events. Greeco has since left the ministry and has submitted a request for compensation for labor accidents against Brown after developing a post-traumatic stress disorder that he said that he began to live after the 2021 incident. The case is settled, according to court documents.

Greeco has since publicly called more changes within Brown University, in particular by testifying to the legislators in favor of the evolution of state law so that universities like Brown are subject to the law of open files.

“I think there should be public pressure to change a game,” he said. “They should be held at least to the same standards as a public police service.”

Similar concerns are shared by some of the students who also look at university campuses to manage high -level demonstrations and work under the administration of President Donald Trump.

“I think that there must be greater transparency on what is happening with these arrests on the campus, in particular at a time when a large part of the public does not know what is happening to Higher Ed and there are disagreements at the national level on the direction of the higher danger and what it represents,” said Audrey Gmerek, a brown university student.