Why private-college police forces are a new front in the fight over public records

Chava Gourarie and Jonathan Peters:

IN 2014, Paula Lavigne, a reporter for ESPN’s Outside the Lines program, began investigating college athletes and the justice system. Lavigne wanted to know whether prominent athletes receive preferential treatment during criminal inquiries, and to that end, she requested incident reports involving football and basketball players over a five-year period from campus police departments at 10 universities. After some haggling, she ultimately received documents from nine of them—but she got nothing from Notre Dame, the only private school on her list.