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One year after the #MeToo movement swept across the United States, student-led activism is changing the way sexual assault is reported on campuses. Page 9
Marissa Evans, a reporter at the Texas Tribune, discussed health journalism in a lecture at SU’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Page 3
Detention center prepares for new law By Madeleine Davison staff writer
See how crime at SU stacks up in recent years the daily orange
he number of reported rapes and stalking incidents at Syracuse University generally stayed the same between 2016 and 2017, according to crime statistics released by its Department of Public Safety on Monday. The number of liquor and drug law violations
decreased in the same time period, according to SU’s annual security report. SU, along with all colleges and universities that receive federal money, is required to release the report annually by Oct. 1 as part of the Jeanne Clery Act. The number of reported rapes at SU more than doubled from five to 13 between 2014 and 2017, the report showed. Check out the accompanying graphics to see how SU’s report compared through 2014-17.
jmulle01@syr.edu | @jordanmuller18
Drug law violations resulting in disciplinary action at SU
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In 2012, Syracuse men’s soccer head coach Ian McIntyre traveled to Norway and began a relationship with College Scholarships USA. Page 12
city
CRIME WATCH
By Jordan Muller, Talia Trackim and Sarah Rada
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As a legally binding deadline approaches, Hillbrook Juvenile Detention Center must prepare for one of its biggest challenges yet: admitting older teens facing felony charges. The center on Velasko Road in Syracuse is facing a balancing act. It must hire enough qualified workers to meet state law requirements while efficiently caring for an ever-shifting population of young residents. Raise the Age, a law signed by New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo in April 2017, reclassifies 16- and 17-year-olds as minors in the state’s criminal justice system and prohibits them from being housed in county jails. Starting Monday, juvenile detention facilities like Hillbrook will accept some 16-year-olds awaiting trial on felony charges, said Damian Pratt, Hillbrook’s director of juvenile justice and detention services, at an Onondaga County Legislature committee meeting. In October 2019, the facility will also start admitting 17-year-olds. In the coming months, Hillbrook needs to fill at least 15 new positions,
Pratt said. In calculating the number of new hires, Hillbrook must account for frequent changes in the number of residents as teens are admitted for pre-trial detention and depart after their trials, according to county legislature minutes. The number of 16- and 17-year-olds arrested on felony charges decreased by 27 percent between 2013 and 2017. Casey Jordan, a Republican legislator from Clay, said in an interview before the meeting that he’s worried Hillbrook might overestimate its future population and overhire, wasting taxpayer dollars. “You don’t want to have staff to address the maximum number of children that would be there – you want to have optimal staffing,” Jordan said. Pratt said that hiring part-time staff allows Hillbrook to handle resident spike, and that he would prefer to hire more employees than he needs. At last week’s meeting, one county legislator raised concerns that new personnel won’t be equipped to deal with one of the county’s most vulnerable populations. State law requires that direct care staff and see hillbrook page 4
Liquor law violations at SU
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With the new Raise the Age law, Hillbrook Detention Center is preparing to accept 16 and 17 year olds. dan lyon staff photographer
on campus
SU works to make technology platforms more accessible By Sajida Ayyup
contributing writer
A campus-wide review of digital accessibility at Syracuse University will take place in the upcoming weeks, six months after SU announced its plans to review disability services on campus. The Information and Communication Technology Accessibility Policy, published on Jan. 1, aims to
reduce digital barriers on platforms like MySlice, Blackboard and university webpages. Chancellor Kent Syverud announced in early August that the disability services audit was moving “slowly” because the external reviewers SU hired can’t work as fast as expected. Christopher Finkle, communications manager for SU’s Information Technology Services, said ITS is
helping the university implement the policy by conducting workshops for faculty and staff to make their content accessible. It’s possible to convert the text to voice a Microsoft Word document, but a PDF can run the risk of inaccessibility depending how it is made, Finkle said. A plugin for Adobe Acrobat called CommonLook helps make PDFs more accessible, he said. ITS can determine the accessibil-
ity of a document and point that out to an instructor so that they can change something about it or convert it to a more accessible format, Finkle added. “Your content as a writer or an instructor is not going to be available to everybody who would like to see it,” Finkle said. “We’re about getting people to understand that (with) something like 10 percent of your students or readers, you run into issues.”
Diane Wiener, director of SU’s Disability Cultural Center, said the university-wide review has not happened yet. The university is calling third-party evaluators to analyze the ICT policy, but the project is ongoing. Wiener said the review will be about every single aspect of campus life related to disability and access — an access broadly defined but specifically related to disability justice, see accessibility page 4