The Indiana Court of Appeals will consider whether private universities should release campus police records to the public as part of a lawsuit between ESPN and the University of Notre Dame.
The court's decision will impact private universities across the state.
Notre Dame Refuses To Release Police Records
ESPN wanted to know more about how campus police interact with athletes for an Outside the Lines report, so it requested records from several colleges – including the University of Notre Dame. But, Notre Dame denied the request.
The university argued it is a private institution so the school's police department isn't subject to public records laws.
In response, ESPN filed a complaint with Indiana's Public Access Counselor.
In an October advisory opinion, Indiana Public Access Counselor Luke Britt put the university on notice, saying from that point forward the Notre Dame Security Police would be considered a public law enforcement agency and subject to public records requests.
"I am not comfortable saying an organization can hide behind the cloak of secrecy when they have the power to arrest and create criminal records and exercise the State's police powers," Britt wrote in his opinion.
Despite the public access counselor's opinion, Notre Dame still refused to hand over any records.
ESPN Takes Complaints To Court
After Notre Dame refused to hand over the records that second time, ESPN filed a lawsuit against the university in January.
"In April, the St. Joseph County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the university, ruling that the university should not be, their police department should not be considered a public agency and therefore they're not subject to public records disclosure laws," says Jeff Parrott, a reporter at The South Bend Tribune.
Parrott has been covering the case for the local newspaper, which has also tried unsuccessfully to obtain police records from Notre Dame. He says ESPN is appealing the court's decision and fighting for the same access to records they receive from other police departments.
"Under public records laws any other police department has to disclose to the public basic information about an incident that an officer responds to – what happened, where it happened, when it happened, who was involved and what was the alleged crime that might have occurred," Parrott says.
Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller recently weighed in on the case, filing a friend of the court brief. In it, he sides with ESPN.
"The state's policy is that the authority granted to a police officer is really at the heart of public trust," Zoeller says. "So we need transparency and openness when it comes to the use of that police power, whether it's a private use which we've granted to Notre Dame and other private institutions, or whether it's the police you see every day on the streets."
Gerry Lanosga is the President of the Indiana Coalition for Open Government and an associate professor at Indiana University's Media School.
We don't have secret police who can make secret arrests and turn people over to secret courts. That is explicitly not the way our country has been setup.
He says he's encouraged by the Attorney General's involvement.
"It's great to see the attorney general weigh in in this case," he says. "I'm not sure that office has done anything like that before in a public access case. So it's good to have that highest law enforcement official in the state weigh in on the side of public access in this case."
Lanosga says while Notre Dame is a private institution, the exercise of police power is one of the fundamental powers of state government and should be subject to public scrutiny.
"There's a real overarching public interest here I think in following the affairs of government and particularly when it comes to police powers," Lanosga says. "We don't have secret police who can make secret arrests and turn people over to secret courts. That is explicitly not the way that our country has been setup."
In a similar case, ESPN sued Michigan State University for failing to hand over the names of student athletes mentioned in police reports. The Michigan Court of Appeals recently ruled in ESPN's favor.
Whatever the courts decide in the Notre Dame case, the ruling has the potential to change the relationships between many of Indiana's private university police departments and the public.
Both the University of Notre Dame and ESPN say they cannot comment on pending litigation.
