Clery Act

About the Clery Act

The Clery Act requires us to communicate campus safety information and has requirements for handling incidents of sexual violence and emergency situations.

The federal “Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act”, commonly referred to as the “Clery Act”, requires colleges and universities, both public and private, participating in federal financial aid programs to disclose campus safety information, and imposes certain requirements for handling incidents of sexual violence and emergency situations.

The Clery Act is named in memory of Jeanne Clery who was raped and murdered in her residence hall room by a fellow student on April 5, 1986. After Jeanne’s death, her parents championed laws requiring the disclosure of campus crime information, and the federal law that now bears their daughter's name was first enacted in 1990.

It has been amended regularly over the last two decades to keep up with changes in campus safety with the most recent update in 2013 to expand the law's requirements concerning the handling of sexual violence.

The Clery Act requires the collection and reporting of annual crime, arrest and referral statistics reflecting reports of specified crimes that occur on and adjacent to, a university campus and certain properties associated with the campus. This statistical compilation must be broken down by specified types of crimes and campus disciplinary referrals, and must indicate if a specified crime is a hate crime.

Crime reports are collected from the UTCPD and Campus Security Authorities. Campuses must also provide a geographic breakdown of the crime statistics reported according to the following defined geographic areas: “on campus” (including further breakdown of the number of crimes that occurred in campus student residential facilities), “in or on a non-campus building or property,” and “on public property.”

Disclosures about crime statistics and summaries of security policies are made once a year in an Annual Security Report (ASR). The law requires colleges and universities to prepare, publish, and distribute, the ASR by October 1 of each year.