‘Gay purges’ and ‘moral policing’: New research examines BYU police force’s complicated history

It started with a fake personal ad in a popular 1970s newsletter for Utah’s gay and lesbian community.

Placed by a Brigham Young University student using the alias John Friday, the ad read it was “not fair” that gay students at BYU were forced to hide their identities or face expulsion. He wanted to start “an underground” group, according to a copy of the ad, and he encouraged gay students and nearby residents to reach out to him.

It was a trap.

Friday was working undercover — for class credit — with BYU’s police department, part of a push by officers at the time to find and arrest gay men on campus and in surrounding Provo, according to a new academic paper published in The Yale Law Journal chronicling the department’s more than 70-year history.

The ad worked, the paper noted. In 1979, it ensnared a Utah County man named David Chipman, who was not a student at BYU but said he wanted to support Friday because he was questioning his own sexuality.

Chipman wasn’t the first to be charged by BYU police as part of the national “gay purges,” which happened at schools across the country in the 1950s and ’60s but lasted far longer at the private religious school owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He was, though, the first to publicly fight back against BYU’s “moral policing” tactics — a milestone that has largely been forgotten in public memory, said the paper’s author, Grace Watkins, a recent Yale Law School graduate and current doctoral student at the University of Oxford.

“A lot of the previous studies of campus police have focused on the elite urban campus police, the Ivy League,” Watkins told The Salt Lake Tribune, “so for my dissertation I was interested in doing a number of case studies on different types of schools, including religious schools, which is how I stumbled on BYU.”

Chipman’s challenge opened the door to exposing BYU’s past practices, including using undercover students to target peers, which was widely considered unethical. It was one of four court cases Watkins researched when piecing together her paper, along with archival records and previously unexamined legal materials.

At its core, the paper examines the intersection of faith and policing, where authority can grow unfettered with little accountability, Watkins argues. For a long time, for instance, BYU’s force didn’t provide police records to the public.

In a statement about Watkins’ paper, a school spokesperson said: “Brigham Young University treats safety as a top priority” and meets “all state and federal requirements for law enforcement.”

In her article, though, Watkins argues the force has functioned more like “piety police” than law enforcement.

BYU department first targets drugs

Before it had an official police force, BYU operated with a handful of part-time night watchmen and custodians who doubled as security officers, Watkins wrote.

By 1952, though, the university created a formal department, with the city of Provo agreeing to pay half of the inaugural chief’s salary.

The department’s new officers promised to enforce both the law and all university regulations, which were based on the LDS Church’s principles. Their first target? Drugs, according to a well-documented crackdown in the 1960s.

A major tenet of the LDS faith is to abstain from alcohol and drugs, including tobacco. The Honor Code at BYU — which students, staff and faculty agree to follow — explicitly prohibits any drug use; disobeying that can lead to discipline or expulsion.

Then-BYU President Ernest Wilkinson said he was worried the “counterculture” of the time “might infiltrate their campus” and asked BYU police to be “unusually diligent” toward drugs. Then-Chief Swen Nielsen told students to report anyone who might “look like they don’t fit on campus.”

Officers heeded Wilkinson’s words, mostly targeting students and non-students alike for using marijuana. They employed undercover students to help — as well as professors, who used their labs to test drug evidence.

Working with undercover students was fairly common on campuses across the country, Watkins noted, because they were cheap and could infiltrate parties. But BYU police raised the stakes, she argued.

Two serious drug cases ended up drawing widespread criticism. The first was a 1968 narcotics raid that at the time resulted in the most arrests — nine — in Provo history.

It happened at an off-campus house where officers suspected students used drugs. After weeks of surveillance, they smashed down doors, pulled out their weapons and threatened to shoot — all without a warrant, according to articles Watkins cited. Six of those arrested were students.

An attorney later accused BYU police of “gestapo tactics.” The student newspaper at the school, The Daily Universe, said the raid — and the alleged use of armed undercover students leading up to it — created an “atmosphere of mistrust.”

At the same time, Chief Nielsen headed the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators and encouraged officers at campuses across the country to use similar tactics. At a 1970 conference, he boasted about one confidential student informant who led to 14 drug arrests, Watkins found.

The “university chemistry or physics departments can be of great value in analyzing evidence,” he also wrote in one published guide.

In a 1971 case later challenged in court, campus police hired a recent graduate to go undercover at a Provo cafe and buy drugs from two men. The men were arrested for selling methamphetamines; a BYU chemistry professor tested the evidence.

One of the men, Thomas Madsen, sued, arguing that he was entrapped and that the charges were based on shoddy drug testing. The Utah Supreme Court, though, upheld his conviction. The case became widely cited to support lenient evidence requirements in Utah.

Watkins said that situation emboldened BYU to continue using undercover student agents long after other departments abandoned the practice.

‘Gay purges’ at BYU continued for decades

In the 1950s and ‘60s, it was common for police agencies across the country — in towns, cities and universities — to have “vice squads” that targeted drug, alcohol and sex offenses, Watkins found.

But as most places started to phase those out, BYU ramped up its efforts, Watkins said, including “extensive monitoring of student sexual activity.”

The “gay purges” at BYU happened in two phases, Watkins discerned. The first, from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, was marked by university police enforcing the Honor Code, which banned gay students from campus.

The code read at the time: “Homosexuality will not be tolerated.”

In 1965, Wilkinson announced BYU wouldn’t admit “any homosexuals.” In a speech, the president said any students who were gay should leave.

“We do not want others on this campus to be contaminated by your presence,” he said.

That direction came from LDS apostles and was passed down to school leadership, who then told campus police to enforce it, Watkins tracked.

Any students found to be gay — typically with little evidence — were expelled. The school also called their parents and, sometimes, informed church leadership. Some students were also subjected to electric shock treatment to try to “convert” them from being gay, Watkins found.

“In 1969, an interoffice memo revealed that the only evidence needed to suspend a student was a report from the campus police ‘indicating that he was a homosexual,’” Watkins wrote.

She dug through firsthand accounts from students at the time. One said security officers often patrolled areas where they assumed gay students would be, such as drama and ballet classes.

Another student, named Joseph “Skip” Morrow, said he worked as an informant for the department until he became disturbed by what he saw. He said BYU police kept files on students they suspected were gay.

Often, Morrow recounted, searches happened without warrants and recording devices were planted in private dorm rooms.

Robert Kelshaw, who became BYU’s police chief in 1974, acknowledged in an interview with The Tribune the following year that “electronic recording devices have been planted on students in order to gather information on roommates and acquaintances.”

Undercover students also patrolled men’s bathrooms on campus, looking for gay students, according to Watkins’ research.

John Friday, the alias of the undercover student who placed the fake personal ad, testified in court about participating in the bathroom patrols. In 1967, one report said, 72 students were reportedly investigated for “same-sex intimacy.”

And in an article from 1965, BYU student journalists reported that said police also regularly patrolled parking lots, trying to catch people in “compromising positions.”

Power stretches into Provo and beyond

The second phase of BYU’s “gay purges,” Watkins said, involved campus police targeting people far outside university grounds.

This spanned from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. Then-BYU President Dallin H. Oaks told campus police in 1979 to be “especially watchful for that kind of crime.”

Kelshaw, the new police chief, responded with gusto. He sent his officers to local parks in Provo to try to catch men “cruising for sex,” Watkins wrote.

He also had officers drive to Salt Lake City to check cars parked outside gay bars for BYU parking permits. In 1979, Kelshaw confirmed in an interview: “You don’t even need police power to take pictures or write down license plate numbers.”

That same year, Chipman’s arrest happened at a nature preserve outside Provo where he drove with Friday. The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah argued to the Utah Supreme Court that BYU police lacked the jurisdiction to pursue him and acted in “obvious and flagrant violation of the proscriptions against entanglement of church and state.”

Chipman was ultimately convicted, required to pay a $450 fine and placed on probation for one year.

The state also passed a controversial law months after Chipman’s arrest that gave BYU police statewide jurisdiction and direct clearance to enforce both criminal law and university policies. Kelshaw had testified in favor.

In response to the criticisms, though, Kelshaw promised to stop off-campus patrols and stop using undercover students in bathroom operations. But, Watkins wrote, he also seemed encouraged by the state’s support.

Watkins found articles and documents that indicate those practices didn’t end. In 1989, for instance, BYU police arrested minors who were not university students for underage drinking in downtown Provo. It was challenged in court, too, and the university again won.

Through the 1980s, Watkins wrote, the department also had about 100 students still actively helping police officers with cases.

Modern controversy

Watkins says the police force’s earlier history shows a “persistent pattern” of BYU officers enforcing both religious rules and the rule of law. That overlap was documented as recent as 2016, when The Tribune uncovered information-sharing between campus police and the school’s Honor Code Office.

BYU police Lt. Aaron Rhoades regularly accessed police reports from other nearby agencies that mentioned university students, The Tribune reported. And in several sexual assault cases, The Tribune found, alleged victims who came forward to university or Provo police were later disciplined for Honor Code violations.

After that reporting — and after The Tribune launched a legal battle for records documenting police correspondence with Honor Code officials — the Legislature in 2019 made the university’s force subject to the state’s open records law.

A separate state attempt to decertify BYU police was dismissed. The school’s police department told the state it would not share information with administrators moving forward, and BYU pledged not to punish students who reported sexual violence.

Watkins’ research also indicates BYU’s interest in information-sharing dates back decades. In 1977, she found, then-Chief Kelshaw asked the U.S. attorney for Utah in a letter if passing along law enforcement records to the dean of students violated the Federal Privacy Act. Watkins found no documented response from the attorney.

Since BYU said it would make changes, Watkins noted, the university recently split campus police and security into two units, which means police are subject to state records laws but security officers aren’t. She sees that as a way to circumvent transparency.

In 2023, for instance, a security officer at BYU’s Hawaii campus stopped a Black student and told him that his hair violated the Honor Code for being too long; the security officer gave the student’s name to administrators to follow up.

“The BYU-Hawaii case is also indicative of a cycle dating back to the gay purges of university officials assuring the public that BYUPD officers would not enforce the Honor Code, only for it to later emerge that they had,” Watkins wrote.

Watkins’ research indicates the “gay purges” at BYU ended in the 1980s, but the school today still forbids same-sex romantic behavior.

‘Underestimated their powers’

There are roughly 849 religiously affiliated universities across the U.S. “Among them, BYU is one of the largest,” Watkins said, and a “particularly instructive model.”

Some of what she found at BYU has also been documented at other schools. Liberty University — a Christian school in Virginia — for example, was also investigated in 2023 for disciplining students for code violations after they reported sexual violence.

“It is hard to know what rule enforcement looks like at religious universities due to many of these institutions’ ability to keep private records,” Watkins said.

BYU’s public court cases, though, opened up a window and helped fuel her research — especially because the university’s internal policing records were “deaccessioned” from BYU’s archives, she noted in her law journal article.

She hopes to finish her dissertation by next spring, with five case studies on different private, public, religious and rural schools.

Many people, she said, tend to think of campus police departments “as rent-a-cop or mall cops and [have] really underestimated their powers or sophistication as real police departments.”

At BYU, even the patches that adorn officer uniforms evoke that authority, Watkins noted in her work. Running through the middle of the design is the Sword of Laban, a significant symbol for devout members of the LDS faith representing “righteous power.”

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