Officials tighten grip on info

Penn's Division of Public Safety has stopped releasing information about crime victims' specific affiliations with the University.

The move will make it impossible for anyone outside DPS to know when crimes are committed against students, or to keep statistics on the number of student victims.

Until recently, DPS provided The Daily Pennsylvanian with information regarding victims' specific association with Penn, distinguishing between student victims and staff or faculty members. This made it possible to keep track of exactly how many crimes affect students, who are more likely than University employees to be outdoors in the area of campus at night.

A recently instituted policy by the division, however, means that officials will now only say whether an individual is affiliated or unaffiliated with the University.

Officials say that the change reflects an effort to further protect student and staff identities and interests.

"We are . responsible for setting administrative policies, in accordance with state and federal law, that protect the privacy of all Penn and University community members," officials said in a statement.

The information released under the old policy never included victims' names or other information that could generally used to specifically identify a victim.

Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security on Campus Inc. - a non-profit organization geared to the prevention of crime one college campuses - would not comment specifically on Penn's case, but said community members should have access to as much information as possible, as long as individuals' rights to privacy aren't violated.

"We believe the community deserves that type of information: What type of crime is going on and what type of victim we're generally seeing," Carter said. "We would hope they would release comparably detailed crime reports to what a local jurisdiction's police department discloses."

The Philadelphia Police release information about the time, place and nature of crimes, but not the names of the victims.

Though the move is completely legal, DPS officials had made the information public until early this school year. The previous release of information was not part of any mandated formal media policy, officials say.

Federal law - as dictated by the Jeanne Clery Disclosure Act of Campus Security and Campus Crime Statistics Act - requires that all private and public universities report the date, time, location, complaint, and nature of each crime recorded in the area including and surrounding the University.

Universities are not required to release victim name or affiliation with the school. However, the security force of a private institution may include this information, either at their own discretion or if mandated by state laws, according to the Clery Act.

According to Security on Campus, information on the victim's affiliation with the University must be released once the victim is completely safe and the perpetrator has been captured.

Sandra Whaley, spokeswoman for the University of California, Los Angeles Public Safety, said that she even gives the school's newspaper, The Daily Bruin, access to victims' names - barring circumstances in which doing so would put the victim in danger. The release of such information, however, is mandated by California law, Whaley said.

"In California . you have to put all the incidents of crime in the crime log with the victim's name, unless it is an [open] case or if it is a sex crime or a serious assault," Whaley said.

The UCLA department also releases victim affiliation with the university, though it is not required do this.

Unlike California's, the Pennsylvania law that regulates college information released to the media does not mandate the release of victim name information.

The Daily Bruin does not publish information about specific victims' names in their crime log, supplying their affiliation to the university instead for safety purposes.

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