BYU NewsNet - BYU Police Open About Records

The BYU police department is taking an unusually open stance when it comes to disclosing its records.

The department and other private university police forces throughout the country have recently seen a growing national debate about their legal status. Many of these police forces employ sworn officers, with statewide authority to conduct investigations and make arrests. Some students and media organizations argue that this makes those police organizations public entities, subject to state open-records laws; the universities have generally countered that their private status gives them immunity from such laws, regardless of officers' state authorizations.

So far, legal authorities and state constitutional courts have sided with the colleges. A spokesman for Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff said that the state does not consider BYU's police department a public entity for the purpose of Utah's Government Records Accessibility and Management Act (GRAMA), the state law that governs access to public records and meetings.

"We're a unique animal," said Capt. Michael Harroun, the public information officer for the BYU police department. "We're paid by a private university but derive authority from a public body."

Unlike police at several other private U.S. universities-and despite position of the attorney general's office-BYU's police department has taken the stance that it is a public body that is subject to GRAMA, Harroun said.

In fact, part of Harroun's job as PIO is to determine the status of different police records. Utah law creates several "categories" of records with different levels of accessibility. Public records, which for police are generally records that result in an arrest or conviction, are subject to release to the public. Most traffic records are also considered public. Protected records include those whose release could interfere with an ongoing investigation; traffic accident reports also fall under this category. Often, Harroun said, records are protected so that a defendant in a criminal case can get a fair trial.

"A record is protected if its disclosure would compromise certain things society values, such as a defendant's right to a fair trial," Harroun said.

Records that contain personal identifying information or personal health and education information protected by federal law, are also exempt from disclosure, he added.

"Frankly, it's not a clear, easy [or] user-friendly process to tell who can get what," Harroun said. "You have to be careful handing out records. On the one hand, you don't want to censor information; on the other hand, you have to protect people's [privacy] rights. In-house, we don't always agree."

Harroun said he gets about three to five records requests per month, usually from individuals wanting copies of their own records or from other departments conducting background investigations.

Campus police at other private institutions have generally not been as willing to release records. In at least two recent cases, student journalists have filed lawsuits seeking release of campus police records under state open records laws.

At Mercer University in Atlanta, a former student journalist filed a lawsuit in Bibb County Superior Court in 2004. The Superior Court judge, L.A. McConnell, sided with the student in ruling that campus officers with state-sanctioned police authorities were agents of the state and subject to open records laws.

The state's Court of Appeals, however, reversed McConnell, writing that the state "cannot compel entities that are private, but are granted the authority to perform public functions, to disclose their records." The appeals court ruling stuck, as the Georgia's Supreme Court declined to review the case.

In 2005, the Harvard Crimson sued Harvard University administration officials after the school's police department denied a request for records under Massachusetts open records laws. As in Georgia, the commonwealth's Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Harvard, as a private institution, was not subject to state open records laws.

In both Georgia and Massachusetts, state legislators subsequently introduced legislation that would make private university police forces subject to open records laws. In Georgia, the legislation passed the state Senate and stalled just short of passage in the House of Representatives.