Uproar Greets Call for Student Police Records : Crime: Historically black college justifies requirement as an effort to keep downtown problems off campus.

The fall semester is wrapping up for the first freshmen class admitted to St. Augustine’s College under a requirement that students submit their hometown police records before they can even be considered.

Some students are uneasy with the records check; others welcome the effort to keep crime off campus after a year that saw one student shot dead, a child wounded outside a campus gym and four students robbed in their dorm room by a masked man.

But civil libertarians are stirring, saying the requirement is humiliating and particularly discriminates against black men. The enrollment of the small downtown college is historically black.

“It costs human privacy and causes humiliation for applicants to go to the police department,” said Jim Shields, executive director of the ACLU of North Carolina. “It reminds me of South Africa. We don’t do that in this country.”

Each applicant to St. Augustine’s must get the police chief in his or her hometown to notarize and sign a records check supplied by the college. It asks for details of any police or juvenile records, including traffic violations.

St. Augustine’s received 3,400 applications for 1993-94. Of those, 1,987 were selected for possible admission, and 95% of those applicants submitted the police form.

In September, 537 new freshmen began classes; 63 transfer and returning students were also accepted. All 600 had submitted the form, said Wanzo Hendrix, director of admissions and recruitment at St. Augustine’s.

Hendrix permitted an Associated Press reporter to scan a few applications with the names blanked out. None of the police forms indicated any crimes committed. Some students had minor traffic violations and some reported things like fighting in school, which didn’t show up on police records, Hendrix said.

“If it’s a violation of civil liberties, we have not heard anything from any student to indicate that,” said Hendrix. “They can refuse to sign it, but we have a right to not accept them.”

Students are divided on the matter.

“I think it’s fine. It’s just to protect you,” said Kim Hedgepath, a freshman from Charlottesville, Va. “If somebody went out and killed someone else, I wouldn’t want them to be in the same school with me.”

But senior Rodney Bruce said the records check penalizes students unfairly. He called it “an invasion of civil rights, absolutely.”

“A lot of times, I don’t think people realize the violence is not on the campus of St. Augustine’s; it’s around you,” said Bruce, a political science major from Brooklyn, N.Y. “It’s in southeast Raleigh, a low-income area. But that doesn’t make St. Aug bad. It’s a good school.”

The 110-acre St. Augustine’s is a private college, so the ACLU of North Carolina won’t take any formal action on the police form unless a student seeks its assistance, Shields said.

Shields was particularly concerned about the effect the records requirement could have on black male applicants. In a society still plagued by racial inequality, black men can easily earn arrest records on charges that are “serious and non-serious,” Shields said.

“The fact that the school uses this for a punishment operates against the concept of rehabilitation,” Shields said. “If the person is convicted at an early age and is forever doomed, that is not a happy message for that person or for the society.”

Hendrix said an exception might be made for a student who meets all other admissions criteria but has a minor infraction.

“We might view what is needed, we would probably call their school principal or minister to see if the student is capable of not getting into trouble,” said Hendrix.

Anthony Stancil, a sophomore from Fayetteville, worries about that.

“They’re not giving anybody a chance to turn their life around. By using the forms, they’re saying they’re going to reject you if you have a criminal record,” he said.

St. Augustine’s says it will keep requiring the police check. It is now reviewing applications for 100 vacancies for the spring semester, and all must include the form.

“The ACLU would like to say that (it’s a violation of civil liberties) but it’s nothing a job application doesn’t have. It’s not illegal,” said Tracey B. Todd, director of marketing and publicity at St. Augustine’s.

“When you apply for a job, sometimes that job will require you to take a drug test. You have a choice--do I want to work here or not?” Todd said. “It is not a right to go to St. Augustine’s. You can go to any college in the country that you want to.”