(Photos: Top: A view of Horsebarn Hill Road near the site where Bruce Alan Ursin attempted to abduct and rape a young woman in 2012 on the University of Connecticut Campus in Storrs, Connecticut. Photo by M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle)
Bottom left: After Jeanne Clery was murdered in her dorm room at Lehigh U. in 1986, her mother, Connie (pictured), and father, Howard, pressed for laws to force colleges to release campus-crime statistics. They created the Clery Center for Security on Campus, in Wayne, Pa., where Jeanne’s portrait hangs. Photo by Mark Makela for The Chronicle)
25 Years Later, Has Clery Made Campuses Safer?
Excerpt from the article by Lee Gardner
The young woman started to obey, but the man had forgotten to unlock the passenger-side door. She screamed and ran toward a university employee nearby. The masked driver sped away.
The incident, in 2012, could have ended as a terrifying mystery, with an unknown attacker on the loose. But within a few hours of the attempted kidnapping, Bruce Alan Ursin was in custody. Police found a .45-caliber handgun in his truck, along with a duffel bag containing gloves, duct tape, rope, and Vaseline. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Barbara R. O’Connor, director of public safety and chief of police at the university (pictured above in lower right), says she believes that Mr. Ursin would have been caught eventually. But he was taken off the street within hours thanks to the federal campus-crime-reporting law known as the Clery Act, which requires that Connecticut—and colleges across the country—be prepared to notify students and faculty and staff members of emergencies and security threats.
That is just the kind of fundamental improvement advocates of the law had hoped would follow from its passage 25 years ago. Since then the Clery Act has made students safer—at least in some ways.
