BYUPD Shouldn't Exist – Let's Defund It!

BYUPD Shouldn’t Exist – Let’s Defund It!

BYUPD’s status as a full-fledged police force working for a private entity allows for improper conduct among officers to go unchecked and creates a culture of fear among the university’s students.

BYUPD has come under fire in recent years for its improper sharing of police records with BYU’s Honor Code Office to assist in HCO investigations. The department has a history of mishandling private records — specifically, records regarding student sexual assault. When a department’s actions seem diametrically opposed to student privacy and safety, it leads to an increased distrust among students and a culture of fear that prevents students from reporting serious crimes. Although recent legal challenges have threatened BYUPD’s state certification, the cases haven’t yielded much, if anything, in terms of consequences for the department.

Although, according to Utah law, BYU Police Officers retain “all the power possessed by policemen in cities and by sheriffs, including the power to make arrests on view,” they aren’t subject to the regulations most police departments abide by. For example, BYUPD refused to comply with Utah GRAMA requests, which provide a legal avenue to make police records accessible to the public, until 2019. Even then, this change wasn’t of the department’s own volition — it only came about as a result of Utah’s legislature passing a bill requiring private universities to do so, specifically targeted at BYU’s police force.

In BYUPD (and in the national culture of private police forces more broadly), university police constitute an egregious legal oversight. According to commentary from the ACLU, “these departments are able to evade public record laws, allowing countless cases of police abuse and force to go unseen and unpunished.” Utah is no different. The unholy union between state and university power naturally requires for these departments to act in ways antithetical to the duties of a Peace Officer. Employed by a religious university with a notoriously stringent moral code, BYU police create a hostile environment wherein their duties as a state officer are interwoven with an obligation to enforce BYU’s moral policy.

LIEUTENANT RHOADES

In 2016, BYUPD Officer Lieutenant Aaron Rhoades accessed the police report of a 41-year-old Provo resident charged with sexual assault against a female BYU student, Madison Barney. Rhoades accessed these files under a direct request from BYU’s Honor Code Office, after receiving an email inquiring into a “report alleging that one of our students (Madison Barney) has falsely accused a community member… of rape." Records obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune revealed that BYUPD accessed and shared full access to these records, including sensitive medical information from Barney’s sexual-assault exam, with the Honor Code Office.

Barney — who publicly came forward to share her story with the Salt Lake Tribune, was forced to comply with an Honor Code investigation or face expulsion from Brigham Young University. As she describes her reaction to the Tribune: “the fact that they could read that and just not care makes me want to throw up… that they would read about the violence, the screaming, the crying — I don’t see how any human being could read through that and have anything but compassion.”

Barney’s story isn’t the only instance of Rhoades’ abuse of police power. Over two years as a BYUPD officer, Lieutenant Aaron Rhoades accessed thousands of records from a shared Utah police database, most of which were cases not involving BYUPD in any capacity. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Rhoades searched for the term “sexual offense” over fifty times — which adds up to more than any of his other search terms combined. Lt. Rhoades sent 21 police reports of sexual assault to BYU’s Honor Code and Title IX offices; 12 of these cases did not involve the BYU Police Department in any way.

According to Utah law, any public employee who improperly shares confidential records could be subject to a maximum of 6 months in jail and a $1000 fine. However, Aaron Rhoades was never prosecuted by the state. He resigned from the force in 2018, and eventually relinquished his status as a Peace Officer in the state of Utah, but never faced legal consequences for his actions as a BYUPD officer.

Lt. Rhoades is just one piece in a larger puzzle of problematic behavior. BYU’s 2020 “Campus Climate Survey”, which received over 12,000 responses, reveals how BYUPD’s behavior impacts student reporting of sexual assault. The survey found that 93% of respondents believe “their compliance with the Honor Code would be investigated” if they reported a sexual misconduct case to campus authorities. Additionally, it found that only 10% of student victims at BYU choose to formally report their assault to any authorities whatsoever — a number that’s roughly half the national average for US universities. Among these students, 52% cited one of the following reasons as to why they didn’t speak up: fear of facing Honor Code discipline, fear of being blamed by authorities, or fear of their confidentiality not being protected.

It’s obvious why students feel these fears to report to authorities; Madison Barney, without even voluntarily reporting her case, did face Honor Code discipline, was blamed by formal authorities, and did have her confidentiality rights violated.

BYUPD: Where It Stands

BYUPD was set to be decertified by the Utah Department of Public Safety two years ago, after refusing to comply with a subpoena brought against it by Utah POST (Police Officer Standards and Training) to investigate Rhoades’ misconduct at the department.

However, after two years of legal battles, Judge Richard Catten ruled on January 6, 2021, that BYUPD will retain its police certification. In his decision, he claims that unclear legal statutes regarding how and when a university police force can be defunded “have unjustly affected both parties in this case.” The decertification of BYU’s police force would’ve been the first time in Utah’s history that an entire police department was completely decertified — meaning that there are almost no structural guidelines in place for when it’s legal to do so. Catten described a “startling lack of guidance from the statutes and rules that govern the certification of BYUPD” as he attempted to draft his decision. Essentially, the judge ruled that he is unable to enforce statutes governing a private police force’s behavior — because there aren’t clear rules to enforce.

Judge Catten himself was also quick to note BYUPD’s failures to act like a legitimate police department. Catten said he would have expected the police force to comply with POST’s subpoena, like a normal police department would; however, the university’s police force took a different approach by, as he said: “hiring multiple attorneys, obtaining a secrecy order in court and asking for a state investigation”. This alone should be enough to demonstrate that the department doesn’t act like a police force, and it shouldn’t be treated like one.

All of this boils down to one central idea: universities shouldn’t be able to utilize state-sanctioned authority to protect their private interests. Although BYUPD won the case on technical grounds, the fact remains that the department has no meaningful restrictions on its procedures, and no worthwhile oversight to prevent it from abusing state power.