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Responding to a variety of constituent pressures in recent years, a number of states in the U.S. have enacted legal requirements that their public universities conduct background checks on prospective new employees. The assumption behind these mandates is that background checks reduce crime on campus. This study will attempt to test that assumption by utilizing data gathered under the reporting requirements of the Clery Act, from four states which have passed legislation requiring background checks: Arizona, Kentucky, Utah, and Wisconsin. The results of this preliminary study suggest that states that have either legislated or mandated the use of criminal background checks on new hires in university environments have not experienced a reduction in Clery Act incidents on their campus when comparing their pre-background check activity with their post-background check implementation. When the quality of the background check being utilized is included in the analysis, the results continue to show that there is no change in the Clery Act incident levels when comparing their pre-background check activity with their post-background check implementation.It is important to note that, prior to the launch of this study, we did not find any specific references to suggest that Clery Act reports were primarily capturing student level criminal data so we were surprised to find that background checks had no impact at all on campus crime levels.So, the results of this study may inadvertently provide support to the recognition that the Clery data tend to reflect only student-level criminal activity whereas the background checks analyzed in this report were applied only to new hires or transfers to new positions.While student employees were often covered in these policies, the general student population was not, setting the stage for a necessary follow-up study that looks at Clery Act data in universities that are utilizing background checks in their admissions practices to see if there is a measureable impact on their Clery campus crime statistics.

There is general agreement in the literature that student-on-student crime accounts for the overwhelming majority of crimes committed on campus in the United States (Dickerson, 2008). Background checks on students as a requirement of admission is one tool that may prove effective in reducing crime on campus. So far only one state, North Carolina, has enacted a modified version of such a requirement for admission to their public institutions of higher education. Specifically, North Carolina state schools have implemented background checks on students who first self-disclose to either criminal or disciplinary violations as part of the application process. The actual size of this opt-in group is not known, but the opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the first statewide initiative to background check students at the point of admission is the motivation for this study. This preliminary study uses the data gathered under the reporting requirements of the Clery Act to assess the impact of student background checks on the reported level of crime in the state schools in North Carolina. The results preliminarily suggest that the implementation of a modified student background check policy, requiring prior self-disclosure to a criminal or disciplinary violation, as a requirement to run a background check, has not contributed to a reduction in the total number of criminal activities on those campuses as reported in the Clery data. Given the limited number of schools assessed, the lack of information about how many students opted in to the disclosure and the lack of a comprehensive application of the background check policy on all admitted students, much more research needs to be done in this area before a strong causal argument can be made that student background check practices do not contribute to observed reductions in campus crime as measured by the number of Clery Act reports for the universities included in this research.

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