Anyone wanting to know about crimes reported on Winston-Salem State University's campus would have a hard time finding the information this semester.
That's because the university has not been keeping a log of reported crimes, as is required by federal law.
Pat Norris, WSSU's police chief, said that her department stopped updating the log in January because of a lack of resources. The log is now being redone, in part because her department believes that it was putting too much information into the log entries.
"We only had one person preparing that," Norris said. "That person had a full (case-load) that he was working, plus parking-manager duty, plus the blotter, plus conducting some surveillance.… It's just hard for one person to manage that."
The News Argus, the student newspaper at WSSU, first reported on problems getting the crime log, which the newspaper had published in past years.
In March, Lt. Patrick Ansel told the newspaper that he was making sure that the blotter follows laws about what information can be released, especially about victims.
State laws generally make victim names public, with some exceptions, but the federal Clery Act does not allow releasing information that would identify a victim.
Norris said she and other officers realized that they had a problem with their log while attending a training seminar a few weeks ago in Boone on assessing threats and compliance with the Clery Act. Campus safety has been a focus across the country after the shootings in 2007 at Virginia Tech.
What's now known as the Clery Act was passed in 1990, four years after the rape and murder of Jeanne Clery at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. Clery's parents began lobbying for the university to disclose crimes after they found out that Lehigh's students had not been told about violent crimes on campus in the three years before her murder. The act requires schools receiving federal money to develop and publicize security policies, to warn students about serious crimes, to submit annual statistics and to create an annual report.
The crime log is required for any college with a campus police department. It has to include a short description of the crime, when and where it happened, and the status of the case.
Norris said that her department has been working for a few weeks on a system to keep the log updated. Officers will work through the weekend to get the log ready by Monday, she said.
"It's important enough that we're going to make sure it's done," she said. "We're going to be working this weekend on it to get it all out there."
■ Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.com.
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