abstract. Religiously affiliated universities are permitted to maintain their own private police under the rationale that these departments serve an educational, rather than religious, mission. This Note calls that rationale into question by uncovering the history of the Brigham Young University Police Department’s (BYUPD’s) morals policing, which blurred the lines between the enforcement of the law and the school’s religious Honor Code. Drawing on extensive archival research and previously unexamined legal materials, this history reveals how the BYUPD waged vice- and sexual-policing campaigns that extended far beyond campus borders.

The Note argues that BYU’s religious affiliation shaped the methods, priorities, and powers of its campus police. In the 1960s, the BYUPD enlisted students and professors to assist with undercover drug operations, resulting in haphazard investigative tactics that disrupted campus life. During the 1970s, university administrators encouraged the BYUPD to aggressively police sexual morality. In response, campus officers used undercover student agents to conduct surveillance and sting operations targeting gay men living in Provo. Then, following a significant expansion of the BYUPD’s statutory authority in 1979, local residents reported that officers were using their law-enforcement powers to conduct Honor Code investigations off campus. In the 2010s, similar concerns resurfaced when it was discovered that a BYUPD officer had shared confidential police reports with administrators to punish victims of sexual violence for Honor Code violations related to their assaults.

Despite repeated attempts to separate the BYUPD’s law-enforcement and student-discipline functions, misconduct continued. This cycle suggests that the BYUPD’s religious and police duties are inextricably entangled. These findings provide a cautionary tale as more religious universities—and, more recently, megachurches—establish their own law-enforcement agencies nationwide. The Note concludes by mapping the legal landscape of this growing category of private police and reflecting on the inherent risks posed by departments acting under the authority of both church and state.

author. J.D. 2025, Yale Law School; DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford; MSt 2018, University of Oxford; B.A. 2017, University of Notre Dame. This Note would not have been possible without the first-person accounts of victims and advocates who protested the BYUPD’s morals policing, often at great personal cost. I am deeply indebted to the scholarship of Connell O’Donovan, Taylor Petrey, Gregory Prince, D. Michael Quinn, and Ben Williams, as well as the many archivists who helped identify and gather materials. My research was generously supported by the American Society for Legal History’s Kathryn T. Preyer Award and Student Research Colloquium; the Yale Law School Joseph Parker Prize; Monica Bell’s Race, Inequality, and the Law course; and the University of Michigan Junior Scholars Conference. In particular, I thank Anna Lvovsky, Monica Bell, and Emily Prifogle for their detailed feedback and encouragement. Additional thanks are due to Elizabeth Hinton, Doug NeJaime, Claire Priest, John Witt, Vanessa Miller, Lyle Cherneff, Isaac May, Stephen Tuck, Nicole Breault, Brian Highsmith, Alex Zhang, Jessica Boutchie, Fiona Furnari, Gideon Yaffe, and the members of his 2024 criminal-law small group. Finally, I am enormously grateful to the Yale Law Journal team for their meticulous work and dedication, with special thanks to Kevin Yang, Shreya Minama Reddy, Beatrice L. Brown, Allura Landsberg, Lily Moore-Eissenberg, and the First-Year Editors.

Introduction

In 1978, an anonymous request appeared in The Open Door, a community newsletter for gay and lesbian residents of Utah.1 The writer hoped to connect with gay men in Provo, home to Brigham Young University (BYU), the flagship educational institution for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon or LDS Church. At BYU, where same-sex intimacy was banned by the school’s Honor Code, such a request carried particular weight.2 The message stated: “I have put much deep thought into [forming a gay] underground here . . . for anyone interested in the BYU area . . . get in touch with me. . . . First names only though, please. [BYU campus] [s]ecurity here seems to be working overtime in the places we’ve felt relatively safe in, until recently.”3 But these were not the words of a young man seeking connection. They were a trap placed by “John Friday,” an undergraduate student who was earning course credit to provide “undercover work and general surveillance” for the BYU Police Department (BYUPD).4

These fake ads ran until early 1979, when Friday connected with David Chipman, a Provo resident who was questioning his sexuality.5 After several days of correspondence, the two men drove to a nature preserve in a neighboring county.6 Friday later testified that his “purpose was to pose in an undercover role as a homosexual” in his interactions with Chipman, who had “many questions about the life and feelings of a homosexual.”7 Noting that Chipman “seemed so scared” and “unwilling to make the first move,” Friday suggested they meet again later that day at the more private location of a friend’s house.8

Unbeknownst to Chipman, BYUPD officers were listening to their conversation.9 Friday was wearing a wire that transmitted audio to the campus-police surveillance team, who had followed the pair to the nature preserve in unmarked cars.10 Chipman later testified that he eventually reached over and touched Friday’s upper thigh.11 Suddenly, Friday turned to him and said, “[Y]our ass is grass,” which was the code phrase he used to summon the BYUPD for arrest.12 Chipman was charged with forcible sexual abuse; Friday alleged that Chipman groped him without consent.13

Far from an isolated incident, Chipman’s arrest was part of the BYUPD’s decades-long crusade against “deviant” conduct, particularly same-sex relationships, premarital sex, and drug use. This Note uncovers the history of the BYUPD’s morals-policing campaigns, arguing that they blurred the line between law enforcement and religious discipline in ways that stretched the limits of the department’s legal authority. These campaigns devastated the lives of the marginalized people they targeted and extended far beyond campus to ensnare people like Chipman who were not affiliated with the university.

For the purposes of this Note, I use several related terms to describe the BYUPD’s enforcement activities. “Morals policing” serves as the broadest category, which refers to the investigation of crimes against public order, rather than crimes against people or property.14 Within this umbrella falls “vice policing,” which historically targeted criminalized activities such as drug use and same-sex relations.15 In the 1950s, many municipal police departments formed dedicated vice squads that enforced antisolicitation and sodomy laws against gay men.16 Thus, “sexual policing” represents a further subset focused specifically on offenses ranging from public indecency to private consensual acts between same-sex partners. While secular laws on illicit sex were indirectly influenced by religious values, the BYUPD’s approach to morals policing was distinctive due to its explicit connection to LDS doctrine on sexuality, temperance, and personal conduct, which resulted in particularly intrusive and wide-ranging enforcement practices.17 Moreover, the BYUPD’s morals-policing campaigns operated on a different timeline than city police; the campus police escalated their operations in the 1970s, just as these practices were starting to decline among municipal vice squads.18

These distinctive characteristics arose from the institutional context of the BYUPD. The department’s position within a religiously affiliated university gave it both the means and the motive for intensive morals policing: university resources enabled unique investigative tactics, institutional interests drove patrol priorities, and officers’ dual role in disciplining students and enforcing laws conferred specialized powers. Drawing on original archival and case research, this Note illustrates how these tactics, priorities, and powers shaped the BYUPD’s morals policing in three ways.

First, the BYUPD’s access to university resources facilitated unconventional and often-unethical experimentation in their policing methods.19 In the early years after its founding in 1952, the BYUPD had limited funds, equipment, and access to law-enforcement services, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Laboratory.20 However, its officers aspired to expand their department’s operations and prestige.21 In pursuit of these goals, the department relied on university resources to replicate traditional police services.22 For example, during the student protest movement of the 1960s, it enlisted students to assist with extensive undercover operations and used faculty to test forensic evidence.23 These operations entrenched policing as an enduring feature of university life by weaving it into BYU’s academic and social structures. They exposed students to the dangers of undercover work, incentivized them to spy on their peers, and diverted academic resources to sustain the BYUPD’s daily operations.24 And because these students and professors were largely untrained, their work was haphazard, sometimes resulting in misconduct.25 Yet the BYUPD was often able to overcome these procedural failings in court and, in doing so, contributed to a police-friendly body of case law that applied to all law enforcement in the state.26

Second, BYU administrators deployed the campus police to advance the university’s religious agenda.27 Specifically, administrators directed the department to shield students from what they deemed immoral influences in Provo, particularly “homosexuality” and drug use.28 These institutional directives aligned with the BYUPD leadership’s personal support for morals policing, as well as their goal of expanding the department’s powers.29 This convergence of administrative pressure and departmental interests drove the BYUPD’s aggressive focus on vice and sexual policing, which they pursued through drug raids and sting operations targeting gay men from the 1960s through the 1980s.30 While officers made arrests under secular state laws, the university’s religious mission influenced what the department chose to prioritize on patrol and where it directed its resources.31 In this way, university administrators’ religious agendas played a role in determining who was arrested.

Lastly, the BYUPD improperly used its law-enforcement powers to enforce student disciplinary rules.32 From the department’s early decades, officers were tasked with enforcing the university’s religious conduct code in addition to state and federal law.33 Eventually, the BYUPD successfully lobbied for statutory powers that included the ability to enforce university rules.34 This dual role created concerning overlap, as officers used both their formal powers and their informal authority as uniformed police to enforce the Honor Code.35 Indeed, Honor Code investigations drew on officers’ training in interrogation and surveillance techniques and also carried the implicit threat of legal consequences.36 These blurred lines only further entangled the BYUPD’s law-enforcement role with its religious responsibilities and created opportunities for misconduct. In the 2010s, for example, one officer misused confidential law-enforcement databases to help administrators identify Honor Code violations, including to punish women who reported sexual violence.37

The history of BYUPD morals policing tells a story of precarious progress. While the department has formally ended its enforcement of the Honor Code and discontinued undercover student operations, these changes came only after sustained pressure from students, local residents, advocates, and state officials.38 Among these critics were members of the LDS Church, who argued that these practices were incompatible with both their faith and the separation of church and state.39

Yet the BYUPD’s history also suggests a recurring cycle: the department implements policy changes in response to public criticism, but as public attention wanes and specific incidents fade from memory, the same misconduct resurfaces either in its original form or through new methods. This pattern indicates that internal policy reforms alone cannot fully disentangle the BYUPD from the university’s religious mission. It also demonstrates that gender, sexual, and racial minorities bear the brunt of misconduct. Lastly, this cycle underscores the importance of preserving the historical record of the BYUPD’s morals-policing campaigns, which has been largely absent from recent policy debates about the department’s powers.40

At first glance, BYU may seem like an outlier case due to its connection to the LDS Church. However, the history of the BYUPD serves as a cautionary tale with wide applicability to other religiously affiliated campus police, campus law enforcement writ large, and private police forces, as described below.41

Religiously affiliated campus police. Much of the existing scholarship on campus policing has focused on Ivy League private institutions, leaving religiously affiliated campus police largely unexamined.42 However, this literature does not fully capture the distinct dynamics at play within religiously affiliated universities, which comprise a substantial subset of higher education. As of 2021, 849 such institutions enrolled close to two million students.43 Among them, BYU is one of the largest religiously affiliated universities by enrollment, and its police department was a leader in developing the field of campus law enforcement, making it a particularly instructive model.44

These characteristics make the BYUPD a useful comparator for campus police at conservative religious colleges, which is a particularly timely contribution given recent legislative efforts to establish new campus police departments at these institutions.45 While some universities maintain only nominal religious ties, others—like Liberty University and Bob Jones University—incorporate religious doctrine into virtually every aspect of university life, from student conduct codes to curricular
requirements.46 In these respects, such universities share key aspects of BYU’s institutional structure. And though the LDS Church is doctrinally distinct from other Christian denominations, it nevertheless “share[s] a great deal with the theological and political conservatism of evangelicals and Protestant fundamentalists.”47 As a result, BYU and conservative Christian universities enforce similar conduct codes, including restrictions on same-sex relationships and gender presentation. Because many of these institutions limit access to campus police records in their institutional archives, this case study offers a rare glimpse into what their operations could look like, providing a view into how religious doctrine can influence the exercise of police power and how these policing priorities can extend past campus boundaries.48

The BYU case study also helps explain why prior constitutional challenges to religiously affiliated university police have failed. These Establishment Clause challenges relied on abstract arguments that the mere existence of these departments violates the separation of church and state.49 By contrast, the history of the BYUPD offers specific examples of where religious doctrine directly influenced law-enforcement decisions. The BYU case study also offers insights into how to find such evidence. Religious entanglement in campus policing may not be clear on the surface of an arrest or investigation; rather, it often emerges only through deeper examination of the department’s history and institutional culture.

Campus law enforcement as a whole. Campus law enforcement encompasses nearly 1,300 agencies nationwide, with many commanding multimillion-dollar budgets and military-grade equipment, such as tanks and grenade launchers from the Department of Defense.50 The BYU case study reveals two little-known aspects of this field. First, the morals policing at BYU represents one chapter in a larger story of higher education’s policing of sexuality, which was by no means restricted to religiously affiliated institutions.51 Second, like other campus police, the BYUPD employed extensive surveillance and undercover operations to monitor student behavior.52 These tactics clashed with the “student-oriented” service image that these departments have cultivated.53

These insights challenge the popular perception of campus police as a less punitive alternative to city police.54 While campus police are often used to handle student misconduct internally, the BYUPD’s history reveals that campus police can in fact subject students to more intensive surveillance than municipal police.55 In BYU’s case, the campus police engaged in extensive monitoring of student sexual activity.56 At other universities, these activities were more focused on student political organizing.57

The BYU case study also highlights the danger of state laws that grant sweeping jurisdiction to campus police, including the authority to enforce university rules and regulations.58 Scholarship by Anne Walther, A.W. Geisel, and Leigh J. Jahnig has gestured to the risk that these laws could enable misconduct.59 The BYU case study builds on this work by detailing examples of such abuses of power, thereby providing greater clarity on the risks they pose. The history of the BYUPD suggests that one practical difficulty is limiting the use of officers’ state police power to enforce student disciplinary rules. Even when campus police departments implement policies to compartmentalize these roles, officers often blur the boundaries in practice. While some scholars have proposed legislative reforms to address this problem,60 the BYUPD’s pattern of recurring misconduct suggests that these two duties are simply incompatible.

Moreover, even if it were possible to maintain a strict separation between criminal investigations and conduct-code enforcement, campus police cannot turn off their informal authority. Allowing officers to enforce university rules expands the reach of law enforcement into campus life and increases exposure to police encounters and their attendant risks. As this Note’s case study illustrates, student discipline takes on a quasi-criminal dimension when enforced by campus police, which conflicts with the educational and rehabilitative aims of the student-conduct process.61 Police may use the heft of their office to investigate Honor Code violations, which themselves can give way to criminal charges. This dynamic raises questions about what constitutes “lawful orders” by campus police and when private universities’ police can be considered to act under the color of state law.62

Private police. Finally, this Note provides insight on the vast contemporary landscape of private policing, with private officers now outnumbering public law-enforcement personnel.63 This scale alone warrants careful scholarly attention. Among private police forces, private university police stand out as some of the largest and most powerful in the United States, which makes them an especially important subject of study within this field.64

As the BYU case study suggests, religiously motivated private law enforcement is not a new phenomenon. Rather, it fits within a longer historical arc of private actors enforcing moral norms, a lineage that includes organizations like the Comstock Society, which employed private enforcement authorities for vice policing.65 Recognizing this historical continuity sharpens the case for investigating the role of organized religion in contemporary private policing.

Religious involvement in private policing is not limited to higher education. In fact, university police have paved the way for a new category of religiously affiliated private police: megachurch police. In 2019, Alabama lawmakers amended the state statute governing university police by authorizing a church and its affiliated school to employ police, a development that could spread to other states.66 Courts have tolerated religious affiliation in policing when tied to educational institutions, reasoning that the police departments serve the school rather than the church.67 However, the BYU case study troubles this distinction. Despite its university affiliation, the BYUPD still entangled its religious and law-enforcement duties. This history casts doubt on the ability of megachurch police—or even school resource officers in parochial schools—to operate as intended.

Finally, a note on methodology is in order. The most direct historical evidence of the BYUPD’s operations—their internal records—has been deaccessioned from the university archives and is no longer available.68 Therefore, researching the BYUPD’s morals-policing campaigns required casting a wide net to find alternative sources. This Note thus draws on original archival research from BYU institutional records, case law, trial documents from the Utah State Law Library, local and student newspaper coverage, state legislative materials, and first-person accounts from former students and Utah residents.69 The Note weaves together evidence from these fragmentary sources to reconstruct an account of the BYUPD’s enforcement practices that might otherwise have remained obscured by the loss of primary-source materials.

To analyze these records, the Note employs legal-historical methods. Investigating the early history of campus police offers a rare view into the internal dynamics—the founding principles, departmental culture, formative events, and leadership objectives—that influenced the development of their legal powers and tactics. This historical perspective helps contextualize contemporary incidents by revealing that they are not isolated events, but rather part of longstanding patterns that relate to the core missions of campus police.

The Note is organized into four Parts. The first three Parts each center on a Utah Supreme Court case that illustrates a different facet of the BYUPD’s expansive powers and the religious interests these powers served. Beginning with the BYUPD’s founding in 1952, Part I describes how the department relied on university resources for undercover operations in the first decades of its existence. These resources provided the department with enhanced investigative capabilities but often led to procedural failings and altered the academic environment of the university. The following two Parts examine different aspects of the BYUPD’s enforcement of the Honor Code and the university administration’s religious directives. Part II explores the period from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, showing how BYU administrators manipulated campus police priorities to advance religious objectives, particularly in targeting gay men with arrest through sting operations on and off campus. Part III investigates the BYUPD’s activities from the late 1970s to the 2010s. After the department gained broad statutory powers in 1979, local residents complained that officers were enforcing the Honor Code off campus. Subsequently, it was discovered that one officer repeatedly misused his access to law-enforcement databases to punish sexual-assault victims. These incidents highlight the potential concerns that arise when campus police are granted off-campus jurisdiction and the authority to enforce university rules, including the risk that officers may use formal police powers and resources to pursue student disciplinary investigations. Finally, Part IV broadens its focus beyond BYU to map the legal and statutory powers of the growing category of church-affiliated police forces across the United States.