Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Two logs don’t make it right
Charleston (W. Va.) Daily Mail: Jeanne Clery, a teenage Lehigh University freshman, was raped and murdered in her dormitory room by a fellow student in 1986. Her horrified parents later learned that Lehigh students hadn’t been told of 38 other violent campus crimes in the previous three years.
In 1990, Congress passed the Clery Act requiring colleges to inform students of campus dangers. Logs of campus police reports must be open to everyone.
But at Marshall University, campus police evidently kept two logs: a genuine one containing brutal crimes, and a sanitized one for students to see.
From Marshall’s genuine Clery log, Gazette reporter Zac Taylor obtained a complaint alleging a gang rape in a dormitory. The campus paper, The Parthenon, said its reporters had been shown a different police log lacking the gang rape complaint.
Recently, Marshall police announced they are charging the former student who made the complaint with filing a false report and lying to police. Regardless of how that case works out, the discrepancy in the logs remains.