The issue no one is talking about
The public outcry, national media coverage, and social media firestorm over an alleged gang rape at Cornell University have focused on the students, the university, and the prosecutors. One issue sits in plain view and has barely been mentioned: private police departments are the antithesis of transparent agencies.
These police forces answer to a private group of individuals, not to the public. Those individuals have every reason to keep crime numbers down and protect the institution’s interests above all else. A police agency whose allegiance runs to an institution rather than the public should not exist.
This week, we look at the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) and how the law lets it operate in the dark.
Police powers without public accountability
CUPD officers carry police powers nearly identical to those of a municipal department like the Ithaca Police Department. They can investigate, detain, and arrest. Yet CUPD is exempt from the transparency requirements every municipal police department in New York must follow.
Want to know whether CUPD’s daily crime log accurately reflects the reports it receives? Want to check whether it has been shaped by an agency with every incentive, and possibly pressure from university leadership, to downgrade crime and steer investigations toward nothing? Don’t waste your time filing a request.
When state legislators authorized this private police force, they guaranteed it would be exempt from public access laws. They could have required departments like CUPD to comply with New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), as every public police department in the state must. They chose not to.
What the Jane Doe case revealed
In this case, both CUPD and the prosecutors who declined to bring charges were caught in what we’ll generously call less-than-honorable practices.
When CUPD wrote its summary of Jane Doe’s interview, it left out that she said she had been raped. Prosecutors received that summary, not her full statement.
When the story broke nationally, the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office told major media outlets it had read Jane Doe’s statement. It then had to retract that claim. The office admitted it had not reviewed the statement before deciding not to charge the alleged offenders, and that the statement was never turned over to it at all.
It is hard to have read something you were never given. Somehow, the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office thought it had found a way.
Normally, conduct like this would send journalists across the country to file FOIL requests to see whether it fits a larger pattern. Not here. CUPD was handed state police powers without the transparency requirements that come with them. How convenient for CUPD.
Why transparency matters most for violence against women
Violence against women is rarely taken seriously in this country. As a recent guest on our podcast can attest, it is not infrequently committed by police officers themselves.
The only way the public can begin to trust a police agency’s response to these crimes is if the agency earns that trust through transparency. Agencies are rarely open about how they handle any crime. They are least open about crimes involving female victims, because their response is usually not one the public would be proud of.
University campuses are breeding grounds for sexual violence and violence against women. Cornell enrolls more than 26,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Thanks to the state legislature, that campus is policed by one of the least transparent police agencies in New York. That is maddening.
Four out of 520
New York has more than 520 municipal, county, state, and campus police departments. Only four are private and exempt from FOIL. Cornell’s is one of them.
It is mind-boggling that any state legislator would vote to authorize a police department that the public cannot examine.
What should happen next
CUPD’s response to sexual assault needs to be put under a very high-powered microscope.
Ordinarily, we would call for a federal investigation that could lead to a consent decree and a reform plan. That ship has sailed. Given how opaque CUPD’s operations are, the responsibility now falls to Albany. We see two paths:
- Bring private police under FOIL. The state legislature should act immediately to require private police forces to meet the same FOIL obligations as every other police department in New York.
- Disband private police forces. Require municipal police departments to serve these campuses instead. This is the option we are leaning toward.
Either option would finally give the public a window into how these agencies operate. Police power should never come without public accountability.
