One House, Two Police Departments

On November 8, 2024, the Cornell University Police Department put out an alert. Someone had reported being sexually assaulted by several men at the Chi Phi fraternity house and coerced into taking ketamine and other drugs. Twenty-two months later, the Ithaca Police Department, across town, said nobody had ever told them.

“This incident was not reported to the Ithaca Police Department,” the department said in late September, according to the Cornell Daily Sun. It found out from the news, after a former student sued on September 16, accusing seven fraternity members of drugging and raping her in October 2024. Nobody has been charged. The Tompkins County District Attorney, who declined to bring charges the first time, has now reopened the case for a grand jury, nearly two years late and one lawsuit later.

We'll say it plainly. In our view, the official handling of this case, by everyone with a badge or a title, looks like the Keystone Cops. A campus police department took the report and never told the city police. A prosecutor closed the file. A city police department that had already stopped publishing its own crime log heard about it on TV. A mayor responded by freezing every student group's event permits. And the federal law that is supposed to let families see all of this, the Clery Act, produced exactly one public artifact: a number in a PDF.

This post is about why. It isn't about what happened inside that house. We don't know, and a grand jury is about to find out. It's about a system in which the institution with the most to lose employs the police, runs the hearing, seals the outcome, and counts its own crimes.

Five offices, five stories

One autumn at one address produced at least five official records. Here they are, in the order they were made.

The campus police alert. The November 8 notice described an assault in the overnight hours of October 25 to 26, Halloween weekend. Cornell suspended the chapter the same day. On November 26, then-interim president Michael Kotlikoff wrote that the campus police were “continues to pursue” a criminal investigation and that the university was reviewing “many allegations” about the house.

The prosecutor's file. District Attorney Matthew Van Houten says his office found insufficient evidence at the time. He told NBC News that the woman's November 2024 sworn statement described her participation as voluntary and consensual and did not allege she was drugged against her will. Her attorney, Thomas Giuffra, says the account she gave Cornell was not materially different from the lawsuit. Either the story changed or somebody's summary of it is wrong. Nobody outside those offices can check which.

The Title IX file. Cornell ran a formal process with at least twelve hearings in May 2025, according to reporting on the complaint. The university says it handed out expulsions and suspensions. The lawsuit says only two of the seven were expelled and that others could cut their penalties by writing essays. Cornell says nobody got an essay as a sole consequence, and it has said federal privacy law bars it from saying more. So the public gets two flatly contradictory accounts of the punishment and no way to see the file.

The civil complaint. A 101-page filing against the seven former members, Chi Phi, and Cornell, among others. It puts the assault on the night of October 19 into October 20, 2024.

The Clery count.A number in Cornell's annual security report. More on that below.

Line up the first and fourth records and they don't even agree on the date. The campus alert says October 25 to 26. The complaint says October 19 to 20. From the public record we can't tell whether that is one incident described two ways or two separate reports, and Cornell's own word at the time was “many.” Two years in, nobody with authority has publicly reconciled the most basic fact in the case. That alone tells you how well these systems talk to each other.

The cop works for the defendant

Start with who took the report. Cornell's police officers are Cornell employees. Their arrest powers come from New York Education Law §5709, which lets the university appoint officers who count as police under state criminal procedure law. They carry real authority. They answer to a private university.

That same university is now a defendant in the civil suit. It runs the admissions office, the donor pipeline, the Greek system, and the Title IX tribunal. When the officer who interviews a victim and the administrator who decides what the public learns both draw a paycheck from the institution with the biggest reputational stake in the outcome, that's what economists call an agency problem. We think it is the core problem here, and no federal law fixes it.

Attorney Laura Dunn, who has spent her career on these cases, put it bluntly to USA Today in 2022. Schools, she said, “have a dog in the fight.”

Then there are the records. Cornell's public-records page says the university “is generally not subject to state or federal laws governing access to the records of public agencies,” and that it answers New York Freedom of Information Law requests for its reports to the state. New York's Committee on Open Government has twice disagreed about the police. In 2003 and again in 2007, its staff concluded that the Cornell University Police Department performs a governmental function and is an “agency” under FOIL for its law-enforcement records. Those opinions are advisory. They don't bind anyone. As far as we can find, New York has never written the answer into law.

Other states have. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Ohio's Supreme Court ruled that Otterbein University's police are a public office, North Carolina passed a law in 2013 opening private campus police records, and Texas did the same in 2015. CJR cited a Justice Department report finding that officers at 38% of private colleges have full arrest powers. In those states, a reporter can demand the incident report. In New York, the reporter can ask nicely.

Compare that with Ithaca's city police, a public agency fully subject to FOIL. Of the two police departments in town, the one that took this report is the one whose records the public has the weakest claim to. That is not a loophole somebody exploited last year. It's the design.

Where Clery runs out

The Clery Act was supposed to be the answer to exactly this. It was named for Jeanne Clery, murdered in her Lehigh dorm room in 1986, and it requires every college that takes federal aid to publish crime statistics, keep a daily crime log, and warn the campus about ongoing threats. We covered how that data works in August.

Here is what it doesn't do. It doesn't make the underlying police report public. It doesn't require a campus department to refer a case to the city police, only to describe its working relationship with them. It doesn't touch the disciplinary outcome. And the school does its own counting.

Enforcement comes late, when it comes at all. In March 2024 the Education Department fined Liberty University a record $14 million after finding it had systemically underreported crime, failed to warn the campus about dangerous situations, kept an inaccurate crime log from 2016 to 2023, and fostered what the department called a “culture of silence” around sexual assault. The previous record was Michigan State's $4.5 million in 2019, after the Larry Nassar scandal. Read those dates again. The fines arrive years after the students they were meant to protect have graduated.

Cornell's 2025 report, published September 4, 2025, counted 23 on-campus rapes in 2024, down from 28 in 2023 and 25 in 2022, according to the Daily Sun.

The second and third figures come from Cornell's 2023 Survey of Sexual Assault and Related Misconduct of about six thousand students, also reported by the Sun. Nine percent of undergraduate men reported an assault too. Twenty-three reported rapes on one side, nearly a quarter of undergraduate women on the other. That gap is the dark figure of crime, and on a campus that polices itself, it's the institution that decides how hard to look into it.

A Clery rape count is a floor, never an estimate. A campus with a higher number may simply be one where more students know where the office is. In our view, ranking colleges on Clery sexual-assault numbers mostly ranks how well they get students to report, and a school that wants a low number has every reason not to try very hard.

Gag orders

If the police side is opaque, the disciplinary side is sealed. In June 2022, USA Today published an investigation by Sara Ganim into schools that made students sign away rights before their Title IX cases could move forward. The research was done at the University of Florida's Brechner Center for Freedom of Information by Brett Posner-Ferdman and Brittany Suszan, who runs operations and data advocacy here at SpotCrime.

What they found was ugly. At Villanova, a student who reported a sexual assault was told to sign a form barring her from sharing the evidence in her own case with almost anyone, including her parents. If she didn't sign, she couldn't see the evidence before her hearing. At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a confidentiality agreement threatened discipline “up to and including … expulsion” for discussing the process. At York College of Pennsylvania, a student who reported being raped by a fraternity brother signed a five-page nondisclosure agreement, told his story on a podcast without naming anyone, and was threatened with discipline for it. Records requests also turned up restrictive language at Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Of roughly twenty-five school policies obtained through records requests, three had the questionable language. Lawyers supplied eight more cases from their own practices. Brett Sokolow, president of the Association of Title IX Administrators, reviewed the agreements and said they appeared to violate federal law. Dunn and Equal Rights Advocates sent the Education Department a letter, signed by more than thirty-five others, calling the agreements “coercive, unconscionable, and retaliatory.”

We are not saying Cornell used a gag agreement. Nothing we have seen says it did. The point is narrower and worse. The whole Title IX system runs behind privacy law, and the 2022 reporting showed what some schools do in the dark when they think nobody can see. At Cornell, the result is a public fight over whether rapists were punished with essays, which nobody outside the building can settle.

The city that stopped publishing

Ithaca's mayor, Robert Cantelmo, says Cornell administrators and police failed to contact or coordinate any response with the city's police. He's right. He then froze event permits for every Cornell student group, Greek or not, until the university publishes new safety standards. That punishes every student group on campus for a case nobody has been charged in, and it does nothing about the records problem.

The city also has its own house to clean. In October 2023 the Ithaca Times ran a story headlined “Ithaca's Crime Transparency Problem.” The complaint in it was ours. Colin Drane, SpotCrime's CEO, told the paper that the Ithaca Police Department hadn't posted a PDF crime log since September 2022 or a press release since March 2021. Of the police agencies around Ithaca (Ithaca College, Cornell, and the Tompkins County Sheriff), IPD was the only one no longer producing a public blotter.

We had asked. A SpotCrime staff member requested the log on February 7, 2023, and the department's records sergeant wrote back that the log no longer existed. We have mapped roughly eighty thousand Ithaca crimes since 2010. The old log carried about twenty a day. What replaced it was a Power BI dashboard with no map and no way to download the rows. (“If you can't inspect the data, how can you trust it is correct?” Drane asked at the time.) Alderperson Cynthia Brock said the department chose the dashboard to prioritize accuracy over immediacy. IPD didn't answer the paper at all.

So here is the town in 2024. The campus police department, which still published a daily log, took the report and kept the case. The city police department, which had stopped publishing, never heard about it. Neither arrangement let the public see the incident report. If the mayor wants an accounting of Cornell's protocols, in our view the city's own blotter belongs in the same accounting.

For anyone building on crime data, the lesson is literal. A report taken by a university police department lives in that department's records. Pull the City of Ithaca's data and you won't find it. A crime map built only on city feeds shows a college town with a hole in the middle.

The group chat nobody chased

According to the complaint, as reported by CBS News, a fraternity member sent a Snapchat message to a group chat at 1:42 a.m. suggesting that a woman upstairs was available for sex. The complaint says the assault went on until about 5:45 a.m.

If that message exists, it is the most important piece of evidence in the case. It's a timestamped record of who knew what, and when, sent to a list of named witnesses. Giuffra told NBC News that investigators should have identified everyone on the chat and interviewed them, and that this “was not done at all.” If that's accurate, it's the kind of miss a first-year detective gets yelled at for.

Social media cuts both ways here. A group chat can turn a private act into an invitation, which is what the complaint alleges. The same chat is evidence most crimes never leave behind. Snapchat clears chats once they're viewed by default, so whether any of it survives two years later is an open question. Preservation requests exist for exactly this reason. They only work if somebody sends one in the first week, not the twenty-third month.

Ten drinks in three hours

The complaint says Doe, who was twenty, had been drinking at her sorority house and then at a bar, and had about ten standard drinks in the three hours before she arrived at the fraternity to visit a friend. It says she was then pressured to take what she was told was ketamine.

Those details are in the complaint for a legal reason, not a moral one. A person who is incapacitated can't consent. They show up in almost every campus case for a practical reason too. The same night that makes a student vulnerable makes her afraid to report, because reporting means admitting to underage drinking or drug use.

New York saw this coming. Its “Enough is Enough” law, Education Law Article 129-B, signed in July 2015, requires every college in the state to give amnesty for alcohol and drug violations to a student who reports sexual violence in good faith. It also gives students the right to go to outside police. Cornell's own survey found most students didn't know how to file a complaint at all. A right nobody knows about is a pamphlet.

Drinking and the party scene don't explain away an assault. They explain why the Clery number is small, and why an institution that counts its own crimes has little incentive to make it bigger.

A new column: hazing

This month's security reports carry something new, aimed squarely at fraternities. The federal Stop Campus Hazing Act, signed December 24, 2024, made colleges start collecting hazing reports on January 1, 2025, and publish them in the reports due October 1, 2026. It also requires a campus hazing transparency report naming student organizations found responsible.

West Virginia University published one of the first. According to WDTV, WVU reported three hazing incidents involving student organizations, and rapes falling from 20 to 12 year over year. It's a first reading with no baseline. Still, the organization-level report is the one place in campus crime data where a chapter, not a person or a building, becomes the unit of record. That's progress. It's also the school grading itself again.

What would actually fix it

Here is what we think would help. None of it is exotic.

1. Put private campus police under the public-records law.Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas did it. New York's own open-government office has said twice that Cornell's police are an agency. Write it into statute.
2. Require referral of felony sex-crime reports to the local department. Not a memo of understanding. A rule, with the victim's consent and a record that it happened.
3. Ban gag agreements outright. Federal law already requires equal access to evidence. Make the prohibition explicit, the way the 2022 letter asked.
4. Publish de-identified disciplinary outcomes by offense. If Cornell is right that the sanctions were serious, a table proves it without naming anyone.
5. Make the daily crime log machine-readable. Clery already requires the log. Require it as a downloadable file, for campus and city police alike.

If you are a parent or a developer reading campus data today, pull both police departments, read the daily log instead of the annual number, and treat every Clery sexual-assault count as a floor. Our posts on clearance rates and the Philadelphia body-camera audit cover what happens when institutions are left to grade their own work, and what it looks like when somebody independent finally checks.

The first public record of that autumn was a campus police alert. The second, twenty-two months later, was a lawsuit. In between, the institution that employed the police, ran the hearing, and kept the count decided what everyone else got to know.