BYU creates new security department that it says will not be subject to Utah’s open records laws
Salt Lake City Utah October 2 2020
Brigham Young University announced Thursday that it has created a security department that will “function separately” from its police — forming a new division that the Provo school says will specifically be exempt from the state’s open records laws.
The surprising move comes after years of legal battles over whether officers at the private religious school had improperly shared police evidence, including while investigating student reports of rape. In response to those accounts, legislators passed a law explicitly requiring, as of May 2019, that BYU’s police department be required to share its reports publicly under the same rules that govern public universities.
In an email, BYU spokesperson Carri Jenkins confirmed that the school does not intend for the security division to have to respond to public records requests under the Government Records Access and Management Act, or GRAMA, because it is “not policing.”
She said, “They will operate independent of the BYU Police Department and, like any private security company, will not be subject to GRAMA.”
Instead, security personnel will monitor buildings and “have responsibility for campus parking,” she said. Their role, overall, is described as more about oversight of safety than law enforcement.
Unlike police officers, they will not have the authority to make arrests or conduct traffic stops. And they will not have access to police databases, which were at the heart of the transparency issue with records at BYUPD.
“They will not have law enforcement authority,” Jenkins said, though she noted that the 10 full-time staffers will be armed.
Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, who sponsored the bill that required police forces at the state’s private universities to comply with public records laws, said it comes down to that distinction of duties.
He believes it’s “perfectly proper” for BYU to have separate police and security divisions as long as they stick to the appropriate tasks, he said. And security officers, under that scenario, wouldn’t need to share records with the public, he said. Essentially, they’re not dealing with significant public safety issues, he said, but rather internal university affairs.
And, because BYU is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it doesn’t have to share that information, Bramble said. “Any private entity, whether it’s a university or a company, is free to have their own internal security department,” he said Thursday. “That doesn’t bother me at all.”
Asked whether he was concerned that campus police might transfer issues or cases over to security if the university didn’t want the topic to be public, Bramble said, “that would leave a trail.”
