Over the past decade, histories of American policing have proliferated. Understandably, the majority of these works have focused on policing major American cities in the twentieth century. These works have transformed the field, in particular by revealing important insights about how racism has shaped policing, but they focus only on the tip of the iceberg. Beyond the largest urban centers, there is also a vast and complicated history of policing in smaller cities, rural areas, and special jurisdictions like college campuses that legal scholars have yet to map fully.
Grace Watkins dives into this less-studied realm of criminal justice history with her brilliant article Piety Police. Watkins has emerged as a leading scholar of campus police, and this article presents an entirely original account of the importance of private religious police forces – primarily those affiliated with religious universities. The bulk of the narrative and of Watkins’s archival research focuses on the development of the Brigham Young University Police Department (BYUPD) and its authority to enforce the law and campus rules, both on and off campus. Through her extensive research in a fragmentary archive, Watkins has uncovered a wealth of detail. Most notably, she reveals the extent of the BYUPD’s anti-gay policing, including a shocking 1979 account of the BYUPD employing an undercover student to place advertisements in the local newspaper to entrap a local gay man and arrest him for forcible sexual abuse.
Along with rural law enforcement, campus police are one of the least studied sectors of American policing, in part because most people think of them as security guards who bust students for underaged drinking. But as Watkins demonstrates, they have broad criminal enforcement authority, and their jurisdiction often extends far beyond the campus gates. The BYU police were able to legally arrest even non-students for entirely off-campus activities because they had been deputized by the Utah County Sheriff Department. (In fact, the gay man’s arrest mentioned above took place outside of Utah County, but a court eventually held it to be legal because a state police officer was also involved in the sting.) In the 1960s and ’70s, the BYUPD focused much of its energy on policing gay students and local gay men, sometimes driving as far as Salt Lake City and St. George to surveil gay students.
Watkins notes that arrangements granting campus police broad off-campus criminal jurisdiction are quite common – indeed, the BYUPD was for a time the second largest force in Utah County (behind that of the city of Provo). To take two prominent contemporary examples: the Harvard University Police are “licensed special State Police officers and deputy sheriffs in both Middlesex and Suffolk County” and the University of Chicago Police famously patrol the whole South Side. (Watkins includes a helpful appendix of state laws that give police at public and private universities the authority to enforce campus rules and regulations. Other campus police forces are deputized by or have memorandums of understanding with local police and sheriff departments.) Despite their public powers, the private nature of campus police forces allows them to avoid public accountability, such as by refusing to comply with public records laws.
Recently, the BYUPD faced a significant scandal when Salt Lake Tribune reports revealed in 2016 that its officers had shared “intimate, nonpublic” details of sexual assault reports with BYU to assist with Honor Code enforcement. This information sharing allowed the university to charge victims of sexual assault with Honor Code violations such as drinking alcohol or allowing a male student in their room. This controversy almost caused the state to decertify the BYUPD and led to the passage of a state law requiring the BYUPD to comply with public records laws. The department responded by splitting the force in two, leaving in place the BYUPD with public powers and creating a separate private security force that could enforce the Honor Code without being subject to public records requests. As Watkins writes, “The department, in the end, may have achieved the best of both worlds: private records for some of its operations, but continued access to state law-enforcement authority.” (P. 3045.)
What little research there is on campus police forces tends to focus on schools at the very top of the rankings. Watkins instead focuses on BYU because it is one of the many religious universities in the United States that is allowed to enforce both religious campus rules and the general criminal law against unaffiliated Americans. This shift in focus is another of Piety Police’s merits. BYU’s history highlights the lack of basic freedoms of speech, privacy, and association for students of religious universities – deprivations that often go unnoticed as the media focuses exclusively on the Ivy League.
At a time when the Supreme Court has essentially read the Establishment Clause out of the First Amendment, it seems likely that police forces affiliated with religious universities and even directly with churches may further proliferate. As Watkins shows, these forces often police Americans with no religious affiliation and her case study of BYU “demonstrates the clear risks of overlapping jurisdiction.” (P. 3050.)
Watkins’s article adds a new and vital dimension to the policing literature, especially as campuses across the nation increasingly use their police forces to spy on and arrest student protestors. It also highlights how anti-gay policing – histories of which usually end at the time of the Stonewall Uprising – persisted longer than is commonly understood. This history is particularly essential as policing of, and other legal threats against, gay and transgender people have again begun to increase. If nothing else, it should inspire legal scholars to investigate the powers, jurisdiction, and histories of our own campuses’ police.
