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University in Oregon works cooperatively with police to end sexual violence

11/12/2014 update: No, of course I’m not talking about UO. The UO administration wouldn’t even share the Eugene Police investigation of the basketball rape allegations with it’s own UO Police. I’m talking about Southern Oregon University in Ashland. New York Magazine has the very powerful story by Katie Van Syckle, here:

This April, three days after she spoke with Luke, she walked into the Women’s Resource Center at SOU. It was there that her story began to diverge from the negative experiences of student rape victims across the country.

The resource center immediately referred Niki to Angela Fleischer, who had helped develop a program with the Ashland Police Department called You Have Options. The brainchild of an Ashland Police Detective named Carrie Hull, the program aims to rewrite the script for how law enforcement handles non-stranger sexual assault. Since You Have Options launched officially in 2013, the number of reports in Ashland has increased by 106 percent. A similar program Fleischer created at SOU, called Campus Choice, has also seen the number of sexual assault reports double, and survivors are twice as likely to go to the police.

5/13/2014: UOPD didn’t see the EPD rape investigation report until they read it on the RG website

That’s what I learned this afternoon from UOPD spokesperson Kelly McGiver. He didn’t seem happy. I was so amazed I asked him to repeat it, twice. He did:

“Chief McDermed, myself, and the chief UOPD investigator never saw a copy of the EPD investigation until the story broke in the Register Guard, and we downloaded it from the RG website.”

That would have been on May 6th, from this Josephine Woolington story. The official EPD timeline says:

On April 14, the detective called the UO and told them of the DA’s determination on the case and advised them that they could get report from EPD Records or DA.

I think President Gottfredson intended to hide these allegations from the campus forever. But even from his own police? How does he expect them to do their job? How does hiding this from the UO police help “protect our students”?

6 Comments

  1. chuck 05/13/2014

    So how much does the uni pay their LEO’s not to know about campus crimes???

  2. bowl of dunces 11/12/2014

    The NYer article notes that smaller police departments may be best positioned to implement the process that’s working in Ashland, because of a smaller caseload and coordination with advocates and counselors. Which sounds like a great argument for having a campus police force. So why am I pessimistic that UOPD could actually pull something like that off?

  3. wishatam 11/13/2014

    what that story makes clear is that the University and the Ashland Police let the survivor decide if and when to share information. People seem to be all in favor of that power belonging to the survivor when the survivor decides to make information public. But when a survivor decides that they don’t want the University to make information public, too many people think they are entitled to know anyway.

    • Max Powers 11/15/2014

      That is the beauty of confidential advisors at the University who do not need to tell anyone else, nor are they compelled to. This allows the survivor resources from the University while still maintaining confidentiality and control in a situation that often feels out of their control.

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