Two University of California at Berkeley fraternities are under scrutiny this week, after the school sent a crime alert out to students warning that four female students might have been drugged at their houses last weekend.
According to the alert issued Thursday (which you can read in full here), "The University of California Police Department has been informed by a UC Berkeley Campus Security Authority (CSA) of a report that two female students may have been drugged at the Chi Psi fraternity and two female students may have been drugged at the Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji) Fraternity."
"Both incidents occurred on the evening Friday, February 19, 2016," the alert reads.
According to another crime alert sent by UC Berkeley on Monday, a woman was sexually assaulted at Phi Gamma Delta, one of the frats implicated in the drugging allegations, that same night. According to that alert, "The victim attended a party at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house on Friday, February 19th. The sexual assault took place between 12:00 and 12:45 a.m. in a room at the fraternity."
Calls from SFist to the Berkeley Police Department (which is investigating the sexual assault) and UC Berkeley police to determine if the cases are related was not returned at publication time.
Confusingly, ABC7 reports that no drugging victims have contacted police, but that the Clery Act requires them "to provide information about these types of allegations, even if they haven't been substantiated."
Signed into law in 1990, the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act requires all schools that receive federal financial aid to disclose information about crime on and near campus. It came into being after the 1986 dorm room rape and murder of Jeanne Clery, a 19-year-old student at Lehigh University.
Speaking to ABC7 off camera, however, a current Phi Gamma Delta member asked about the drugging allegations "denies the allegations and says they were not questioned by police before the crime alert went out."
But UC Berkeley Sergeant Rick Florendo has no regrets regarding the alert, telling ABC7 that "We are going to err on the side of safety and put this information out there."
UCPD also says that if you believe you have been drugged at one of these frats (or elsewhere on or near campus), it's not too late to seek help. According to their crime alert, "anyone who might have been victimized in this manner should seek medical treatment or advice and should consider filing a police report so that a criminal investigation can be initiated."