The Department of Public Safety Oversight Committee was created to hold the campus police accountable.

But widespread negligence of internal policies and of the state laws from which those policies are derived raises important questions about how well the body is fulfilling its role.

The Michigan state legislature gave four-year public universities the right to form their own campus police forces in 1990. The act granted campus police the same authority as state police but just within universities’ jurisdiction. As a condition, the law required each institution to create an oversight committee to act as a check on their respective police departments — a committee that can make recommendations for disciplinary actions against officers.

Section 390.1511 of the law, Public Act 120 of 1990, also specified that these committees must be composed of two students, two faculty members and two staff members, all “nominated and elected by the faculty, students, and staff of the institution.”

At the University of Michigan, the Department of Public Safety was created in 1992 and the corresponding DPS Oversight Committee was created the same year to meet the requirements of this state law. A governing set of bylaws was also created to guide the committee’s work and election procedures.

Since then, the DPS Oversight Committee’s track record has shown that in several crucial respects it is neither meeting the requirements of the state law nor following its own procedures. Potential problems exist in the election of representatives from each of the groups, the fulfillment of the necessary student representation, the frequency of the committee’s meetings and the number of grievances reviewed each year.

This catalog of systemic problems calls into question whether a committee tasked with holding the campus police accountable has fulfilled that role and whether it even can.

A LACK OF STUDENT REPRESENTATION

Many of the most serious concerns about the DPS Oversight Committee rest with the two seats devoted to students.

Sometimes vacant for months at a time and arguably filled in a way that violates the provisions of the state law, the two student seats on the committee have historically been mishandled by the committee and by the Michigan Student Assembly, which has been tasked with filling the seats.

Since the committee’s establishment, a formal election involving all students at the University has never occurred, according to MSA President Abhishek Mahanti. Instead, already-elected MSA representatives are appointed to the committee based on an internal application process and assembly-wide confirmation.

Stephen Hipkiss, chair of the DPS Oversight Committee and facility manager at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, said this is warranted because the student body elects MSA representatives.

“The thought there is that they are in fact elected,” Hipkiss said. “They’re elected to MSA, and MSA selects them from there.”

When presented with the state statute and a description of the University’s current practices, independent attorneys The Michigan Daily spoke with disagreed with this theory.

According to David Einstandig, an attorney for Thav, Gross, Steinway & Bennett P.C. in Bingham Farms, Mich., the practice of MSA representatives electing the committee members doesn’t comply with the state statute.

“(The statute) doesn’t say elected by the ‘student representatives,’ it says the ‘students,’” Einstandig said. “It appears that the law is not being complied with. The statute appears not to give the right to elect to MSA. The right is given to the student body. MSA is not the student body.”

Jonathan Jones, an attorney who practices in Southfield, Mich., had a similar stance. He said that state law dictates that all students participate in the election and that the appointment of representatives by MSA denies students their right to vote.