Campus safety offices are under constant pressure to stay current with federal compliance requirements, and the Clery Act is no exception. At a recent session hosted by the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA), Jon-Michael McDaniel from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln shared how his office has woven AI into everyday Clery compliance workflows, with real, practical results.
Picking the Right Tool
Jon walked through several of the most widely used AI platforms today, including Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and NotebookLM. After experimenting with each, he landed on ChatGPT as his preferred tool, for three specific reasons.
Memory. ChatGPT can carry context across conversations, building on earlier prompts over time. For something as detail-intensive as Clery compliance, that continuity matters.
PDF uploads. For Jon, this is the most important feature when evaluating any AI tool. By uploading the 2016 Clery Handbook alongside a set of program reviews, he has essentially built a searchable repository of compliance knowledge. Instructing ChatGPT to draw exclusively from those uploaded documents keeps the responses grounded in authoritative source material rather than general web content.
Separate projects. The ability to create distinct project spaces lets Jon keep Clery work siloed and organized, separate from other institutional tasks.
What It Actually Helps With
Once the foundation is in place, the use cases compound quickly. Jon’s team uses the AI to read through the handbook more efficiently, conduct gap analyses on annual security reviews, and get direct answers to direct questions without digging through hundreds of pages manually. What used to require a compliance officer to cross-reference multiple documents can now happen in seconds through a well-crafted prompt.
One of the more valuable applications is helping officers write better incident narratives. The AI can prompt the right follow-up questions, provide relevant context, and help officers recognize which incidents may meet Clery reporting thresholds. This is particularly useful for newer staff still learning the Act’s requirements, but experienced officers benefit too — having a tool that surfaces the right questions in the moment reduces the risk of important details getting left out of a report.
That same capability extends to case categorization. Officers can describe a situation and ask the AI to help determine whether it falls into a specific Clery category. Rather than relying solely on memory or stopping to consult the handbook mid-shift, they have a responsive reference tool that walks through the logic with them.
On the administrative side, the AI supports the Annual Security Report process in a couple of meaningful ways. It can review policy statements for completeness and consistency, flagging language that may not align with current requirements. It can also compare program reviews against prior ASR filings to surface gaps or changes that need to be addressed before submission. For compliance officers managing tight deadlines, that kind of structured comparison can save hours of manual review.
Perhaps the broadest benefit is making the Clery Handbook itself more accessible. The 2016 handbook is dense, and finding a specific answer often means knowing roughly where to look before you start. With the AI trained on the document, anyone on the team can ask a plain-language question and get a referenced answer drawn directly from the source, lowering the barrier for staff who are still building their compliance knowledge.
What to Watch Out For
Jon was clear that this is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. A few important guardrails:
- Always verify citations. AI can and does make mistakes. Any answer the system produces should be checked against the source material.
- Keep criminal justice information out of it. To protect privacy, sensitive case data should never be fed into an AI tool.
- Some topics require human judgment. Situations involving stalking, for example, carry nuance that AI is not well suited to navigate. These cases warrant a human review process.
- Only public information gets scanned when the AI draws from uploaded documents, which is an important boundary to understand when configuring your project.
Getting Started
If your office is considering this approach, Jon’s recommendation is to build a dedicated agent or project specifically for Clery compliance work. Keeping it purpose-built keeps responses focused and makes it easier to maintain the document library over time.
The core insight from Jon’s session is straightforward: AI does not replace the compliance expertise your office has developed, but it can dramatically reduce the time it takes to apply that expertise. For offices managing complex federal requirements with limited staff, that is a meaningful advantage.
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