Office of Information Practices

Opinion Letter No. 94-03
March 23, 1994
Campus Incident Reports Public

Daily Activity Reports, or “incident reports” prepared by private campus security officers at the University of Hawaii at Hilo campus, must be made public after information identifying individuals involved in campus incidents have been segregated from the reports. In response to an opinion request by the campus newspaper, which previously only received summaries of the incident reports, the OIP concluded that under the UIPA, the actual incident reports must be made available for inspection and copying upon request. Since the campus newspaper’s UIPA request specifically excluded individually identifiable information in the reports, the OIP concluded that the reports would not be protected from disclosure under the UIPA’s clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy exception.

The OIP also concluded that in the unusual circumstance an incident report contains information relevant to a civil or criminal law enforcement investigation, and has been provided to a law enforcement agency, the report may be withheld if a law enforcement proceeding is pending or a concrete possibility.

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