CLERY ACT Campus Security Authority

Are you a CLERY ACT Campus Security Authority?

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy & Campus Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act) is the landmark federal law that requires colleges and universities across the United States to disclose information about crime on and around their campuses. Among other requirements, every institution must:

• Collect, classify and count crime reports and statistics
• Issue campus alerts
• Publish an annual security report
• Submit crime statistics to the Department of Education

Although we want our campus community to report criminal incidents to the University Police Department, we know that this doesn’t always happen. A student who is a victim of a crime might be more inclined to report to someone other than law enforcement. For this reason, the Clery Act requires all institutions to collect crime reports from a variety of individuals and organizations that Clery considers to be “campus security authorities”.

So how do you know if you are a campus security authority? The Clery Act identifies four groups of individuals or organizations associated with the university that it considers to be campus security authorities:

• The University Police Department
• Non-police security staff responsible for monitoring university property
• Any individual or organization designated under SJSU policy as an individual or organization to which students or employees should report criminal offenses
• Any official of SJSU who has significant responsibility for student and campus activities, including, but not limited to student housing, student discipline and campus judicial proceedings. An “official” is defined as “any person who has the authority and the duty to take action or respond to particular issues on behalf of the institution”.