Public Safety

It isn't often that we at The Spectrum have days like Tuesday. For the first time this year, we were forced to cover perhaps the most sensitive crime story to be found on college campuses - rape.

Rather than hear about the arrest of a UB student on those charges from University Police, however, we read about the incident in the Buffalo News. After calling University Police to verify the arrest took place, we began to wonder why it was neither listed in the police blotters we receive nor given to us verbally. Each Wednesday, The Spectrum prints a public service in the form of the Safety Report, which is meant to educate and inform the UB population of the safety risks at our campus. We cannot fully do our job in this regard if we are not given complete and comprehensive information of the crime on campus.

The Freedom of Information Act, signed into place by former president Lyndon Johnson in 1966, denotes arrests as public records. According to section 1-215a of the act, "Notwithstanding any provision of the general statutes to the contrary, and except as otherwise provided in this section, any record of the arrest of any person ... shall be a public record from the time of such arrest."

The act further specifies that "... 'record of the arrest' means (1) the name and address of the person arrested, the date, time and place of the arrest and the offense for which the person was arrested, and (2) at least one of the following, designated by the law enforcement agency: The arrest report, incident report, news release or other similar report of the arrest of a person." All this information should be provided upon request; that is, within the blotters The Spectrum receives each Tuesday morning.

We do not believe the university deliberately withheld information to protect the accused student. When questioned about the missing item in the police blotters, the director of Public Safety said that the crime had already been entered into the month of January as a pending case and thus would not have shown up in recent reports. Regardless, a crime like this is something students, faculty and administrators alike must be made aware of, if only so they may take greater personal precautions.

If this incident did not appear in the Safety Report because of a technicality, we at The Spectrum must wonder what other crimes fall through the cracks of the computer system. A complacent community is one that is at risk of being taken advantage of.

To further complicate the matter, it is difficult for us to condone printing the names of arrested citizens when we are not printing the names of all arrested citizens. It has been our policy to print the names of those arrested in the spirit of public interest, and that policy is echoed in newspapers across the country. No person should receive special treatment in this matter if we are to be both fair and ethical in our coverage.

Some system must be set into place to ensure this does not happen. If it means that we at The Spectrum must call University Police daily to find out the latest arrests, we will do so, but we hope that an alternative method can be found.

The Spectrum and University Police have forged a good working relationship over the past three years, and it would be a shame were it not to continue as such. Newspapers and police forces across the nation work in conjunction with the same goal in mind: public education for public protection. Through a comprehensive and intelligent listing of university crime incidents, both our goals may be attained.