The Current - McCaskill Offers Solution to Clery Act Failings

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By: Kat Riddler

State Senator Claire McCaskill held a conference call with university newspapers in Missouri discussing improved bipartisan legislation called the Campus Accountability and Safety Act (CASA) re-introduced in the United States Congress March 5.

CASA is an amendment to the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act) that requires universities to disclose information about crime on campus for the safety of its students and which is enforced by the United States Department of Education. While it is required by law to keep crime statistics, there is no uniform record-keeping set into place, and this leaves the act lacking. McCaskill said the new legislation, which she is sponsoring along with nine other United States senators, offers a solution to the Clery Act's failings.

The bill was originally introduced in July 2014, but it has seen several changes that were outlined in the conference call. The act originally asked college campuses to report annually on the campus environment, but smaller campuses had problems with having the resources to produce the more in depth report every year. A compromise was made to have campuses release a campus climate survey report every two years.

"This climate survey is incredibly important because it allows students anonymously to weigh in on how safe they feel, whether or not they are aware of what's in place to be of assistance, if they are assaulted where they can go, if they know where to go to get information, how they believe their campus is handling this problem, what is the interaction they've had with their university or college around the problem. It will be much better than the current Cleary statistics frankly that no one sees or understands," McCaskill said.

Another change to the CASA is how fines collected are used. Currently the fines are going to collection agencies, creating a financial incentive to fine. The proposed new law will allocate the fines to be reinvested in the campuses to fix the failings. According to McCaskill this is to provide the best facilities and resources for the students. The penalties for violations of the Clery Act have been raised from $35,000 to $150,000. If schools are not compliant with the Act, they could lose up to one percent of their federal funding. This changed from the original penalty of losing all federal funding.

"The fines that are collected now will go into a special grant fund that can be given back to cut campuses to help them with more programming and more resources around this issue. The original legislation had those fines going to the various agencies that would be enforcing. We came to the conclusion after visiting with a lot of people around this issue that might be creating an incentive to fine. So that could sever the nest of the agency that's responsible for overseeing this. So this now, I think, will remove that fear with the money being set aside to do positive things in terms of improving," McCaskill said.

Senator McCaskill suggests campuses watch "The Hunting Ground," a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses dealing with athletes in particular. The revised CASA can be found at www.mccaskill.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CampusAccountabilityAndSafetyAct.pdf.

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