A police chief in central Texas was arrested after he failed to report allegations of sexual misconduct while he worked as a campus officer at Texas A&M University-Central Texas.
The Daily Wire will not name the arrested police chief, who was charged after Killeen police learned he had received an allegation from a student and failed to report the allegations, in violation of the Texas Education Code, KXXV reported.
It is unclear exactly what the student reported to the police chief, but the allegations were alleged against a former employee of the university. Title IX violations can include sexual harassment, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. It is also unclear whether those allegations are going to be investigated now or if they even warranted an investigation in the first place.
The Bell County Attorney’s office reviewed the case, KXXV reported, and charged the police chief with Failure to Report Certain Incidents. A warrant was issued for chief’s arrest on June 2, 2020. The chief turned himself in and his bond was set at $2,000 by Justice of the peace Cliff Coleman.
“Now more than ever, the integrity of the police profession requires thorough impartial investigations, regardless of the status of the accused. The Killeen Police Department stands with survivors of sexual harassment, sexual assault, dating violence or stalking,” Killeen Chief Charles Kimble told KXXV.
Texas A&M University-Central Texas also released a statement:
We stand in alliance with survivors of Title IX issues and remind them and our public that we are committed to providing a safe learning environment for all of our students. The University’s Title IX office offers support and services for those affected.
The university made no mention of investigating the student’s claims.
The arrest shows how seriously police and universities are taking allegations of sexual misconduct. Those desires to show their seriousness, however, have led to necessary changes from the U.S. Department of Education, which has issued new guidelines requiring schools to provide accused students and faculty with due process. As The Daily Wire previously reported, the new guidelines require schools to provide basic elements of due process – like informing accused students of the specific allegations against them – something that had been disappointingly missing from school policies across the country. More from The Daily Wire:
The new regulations also include the presumption of innocence for accused students, which does not, contrary to what activists say, mean the school begins by disbelieving accusers. It means, just as it does in the American legal system, that both sides are believed until evidence suggests otherwise.
The new rules also abolish the single-investigator model praised by the Obama administration, which allowed one individual to act as investigator, judge, jury, and executioner in Title IX cases. Almost exclusively, these individuals were trained to believe accusers and were given sole discretion on what evidence to consider – with predictably disastrous results. Given, even schools that provided hearings to students and allowed others to judge ignored exculpatory evidence.
The new rules require the person who makes the final decision in whether an accused student is responsible to be different from the person who served as the investigator. Further, a finding of responsibility can only come after a hearing is held and a representative for the accused is allowed to ask questions of the accuser. In the justice system, this is known as cross-examination, but on college campuses, it is either strongly hampered or completely disallowed. In many cases, an accused student submits questions to the hearing panel to ask the accuser, but the hearing panel ignores the most important questions that would show discrepancies in an accuser’s story.
Schools must also provide students with the evidence that will be used in the hearing 10 days prior to the hearing. Transcripts of hearings must also be kept.
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