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Virginia’s campus police forces and local law enforcement agencies could be required to work more closely on rapes and deaths on campus if the State Crime Commission approves proposed legislation next month.
The commission on Wednesday reviewed a bill offered by Del. Paula Miller, D-Norfolk, who initially wanted to require campus police forces to turn over to local law enforcement any investigations of rapes or deaths on campus.
The commission modified Miller’s bill to require campus police forces to notify local police when a rape or death occurred on campus. It would not require campus police to turn over the investigation, however.
Miller’s bill was prompted by former University of Virginia student Kathryn Russell’s 2004 sexual assault case. Miller and others contend that the university investigation had been poorly handled and shows that campus police shouldn’t be investigating major crimes.
A months-long crime commission study, presented to members Wednesday, shows that disparities do exist between campus police forces and their county or city counterparts. In 2010, campus police made arrests in about 10 percent of the 31 forcible sex offense cases they handled, compared with the 30 percent of all forcible sex offenses that were solved in the state that year.
Local police agencies, which insist that campus police forces can effectively investigate their own cases, said those numbers don’t mean campus police aren’t doing their job.
Rape victims on college campuses often decline to press charges, which can impede an investigation, said Dana Schrad, executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police. Moreover, the report shows that some campus police already often partner with other law enforcement agencies. Twenty-nine percent of campus police forces surveyed said they’d participated in a joint investigation involving a campus death between 2008 and 2011. Forty-three percent said they’d done the same for a rape investigation.
Still, supporters of Miller’s bill say they believe local law enforcement should be taking the lead on rape and murder investigations.
“There’s no requirement, there’s no accountability,” said Gil Harrington, the mother of Morgan Harrington, the 20-year-old Virginia Tech student who was abducted and killed after a Metallica concert in Charlottesville in 2009. “The response to a felony should be standard.”
The commission will decide at its Dec. 6 meeting whether to submit the legislation to the General Assembly.
