Newly surfaced police report shows Syracuse University pushed media suppression

A newly surfaced 1980 Syracuse police report labeled NO PRESS shows Syracuse University asked officers to keep some rape, robbery and burglary reports near campus out of public view. The designation was described as not unusual at the time, but it now raises sharp questions about what Syracuse residents, students and parents were not told about crime around the university.

The issue has returned to the center of the public record through the Alice Sebold case. Syracuse police arrested Anthony Broadwater in October 1981 after Sebold was raped while she was an 18-year-old Syracuse University freshman from suburban Philadelphia. Broadwater was wrongly convicted, served 16 years in prison and was exonerated in 2021. Syracuse.com reported that Sebold could not identify Broadwater in a later lineup, yet prosecutors pushed ahead anyway. Paula Johnson, a Syracuse University law professor, has said race was a central factor in what happened.

ProPublica’s June 30, 2026 reporting said that five years after Broadwater was cleared, questions remain about how one or more serial rapists may have operated for years with little consequence. In that context, the newly surfaced NO PRESS stamp matters far beyond one old police file. It speaks to whether public safety information near campus was filtered before it reached the people most affected, including students living in university housing, neighbors on and around campus, and families weighing where to live and send children to school.

The contrast with present-day practice is stark. Syracuse University’s Department of Public Safety now posts a Daily Incident and Crime Log on its website under the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act, with information for incidents in the past 60 days. What once could be stamped out of view is now supposed to be part of a routine public disclosure system.

The fight over transparency has also reached Syracuse police records more broadly. The New York Civil Liberties Union sued the Syracuse Police Department in March 2021 over access to police misconduct records after New York repealed Civil Rights Law 50-a. The NYCLU said the department denied requests for records of misconduct complaints that did not end in discipline.

Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship said the post-2020 FOIL effort involved hundreds of requests statewide and grew to 35,000 records from 115 departments by early 2024. The newly surfaced 1980 paperwork suggests that the dispute over who knew what, and when, has been part of Syracuse’s public safety record for decades.