Inadequate reporting has been found to be too common and sometimes there are loopholes in reporting, which can be caused by a lack of communication on campus, reducing the law’s effectiveness.
One Michigan-based company has taken action using local university and law enforcement input to create solutions for colleges to make their reporting and communicating easier, more secure and automatic.
CSAReport, a Web-based crime reporting tool that uses cloud-based technology, is designed for those on campus to communicate crime reports to officials and administrators via a mobile device or computer.
The tool is designed to help schools meet their obligation to report crimes for Clery purposes, and the fact that it makes reports immediately known and actionable is what is touted most by Clay Frey, managing director of Criminal Sciences, the company that makes the tool.
“CSAReport closes the gap between the report and those who need to see it,” Frey said.
For instance, colleges and universities without their own law enforcement agency often rely on outside organizations to provide crime reports, meaning the information is accessed infrequently in some cases. Alternatively, CSAReport makes the college or university aware of reports as they are created — even alerting them through push notifications when certain crimes are reported. The institution can then share the reports with a law enforcement agency that can tie its own information to the reports.
Administrators and law enforcement officers can also use CSAReport to generate other information like statistical trends on high-crime areas or times of day, said Robert Macinnis, IT director of Criminal Sciences.
The technology was made specifically for campus security authorities, which is a Clery-specific term for someone in an authority position, who doesn’t officially work in public safety but is required to report crimes under the act. Campus security authorities can be magnets for safety information because students are likely to discuss incidents with people they know and trust, said Alison Kiss, executive director of the Clery Center for Security on Campus, a nonprofit.
Elevated Reporting
Criminal Sciences designed its reporting tool for Western Michigan University after previous work with the institution made it clear that there was no existing product offering a cross-agency platform to securely report crimes, according to Lt. Scott Coy of the university’s Public Safety Department.
The company had done considerable work researching and understanding Clery Act requirements while delivering a reporting and analytics product, CS Watchman, to the university, Coy said.
Some of the key elements of CSAReport include multiple levels of security and authorization, ease of implementation and no investment or annual cost, and that it can be a stand-alone product used to report crimes from multiple sources at any time, including during an emergency, Frey said.
It also takes into account requirements under the Clery Act with its custom forms that direct users to enter information and answer questions like where the incident occurred using predefined fields to qualify the incident as a Clery one. According to Kiss, incorrectly reporting a crime’s geography is a common violation and schools can be fined $35,000 per violation or risk losing federal financial aid funding.
All this specificity helps institutions issue an annual crime report, while also maintaining an accurate and timely daily log to report Clery-related crimes and complaints with their dates, times and locations. Schools must also make these reports public within two business days.
CSAReport replaces the paper trail with a digital footprint. The program tracks all who touch and modify each report throughout its life, making it easier to track fraudulent reporting, and to collect, organize and understand the reports.
Providing a Global View
Coy said that while the university is testing CSAReport to ensure that it’s ready for universitywide adoption, it has used Criminal Sciences’ CS Watchman product for nearly 18 months.
Whereas CSAReport is the information collecting and processing piece for campus security authorities, CS Watchman is a reporting tool that can pull from multiple systems to give a global view of an agency’s key performance indicators for administrators and decision-makers. CS Watchman then tracks and analyzes Clery-related crimes for the university.
Coy said he uses CS Watchman several times a day and at least every morning over his cup of coffee, allowing him to manage information and view trends in real time on his phone.
Mackinac County, Mich., Sheriff Scott Strait is another CS Watchman user. Strait said the county is in the early stages of adopting the technology and has the records management tool in place, with the dispatch system to follow. Although the county doesn’t have a Clery Act obligation, he said Criminal Sciences tailored its Clery-based template to fit Mackinac’s needs.
Like Coy, Strait said the main barrier to implementation was getting the county’s existing vendors to provide access to its databases.
Collaboration and Communication
Because Mackinac is a rural county with public safety officers filling a variety of roles, Strait said he and others at city police, EMS and fire use CS Watchman to share information across services. This is the goal of the tool — to communicate securely, Frey said. “So there are no barriers, it’s all open.”
And according to Coy, what makes the CSAReport useful is that it cross-references Michigan statutes to the federal ones used in the Clery Act so that the university, as well as officers and lay people, can connect using their local language.
“The largest breakdown in reporting, anywhere, can be the lack of communication and common definitions within a single campus,” Coy said.
