Utah Valley University has spent months offering shifting justifications and procedural delays instead of straightforward answers to public records requests about its police departments actions before and after the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on the Orem campus last September.
According to The Blaze, the stonewalling began almost immediately after the September 10 killing, allegedly carried out by Tyler Robinson, and has continued despite repeated, lawful requests for basic communications from UVU Police Chief Jeff Long and his department. Like many Americans alarmed by the murder of one of the countrys most prominent conservative activists, Blaze News sought to understand what security measures were in place ahead of Kirks scheduled TPUSA college tour event that day and whether those measures were adequate.
Those concerns intensified after Kirks former head of security, Brian Harpole, told podcast host Shawn Ryan in November that UVU police including Chief Long had failed to implement key security protocols before the shooting and then effectively disappeared from communication afterward.
Harpole alleged that the outdoor amphitheater venue chosen for the event was dangerously exposed and that the UVU Police Department failed to coordinate with neighboring law enforcement agencies to bolster manpower and deploy additional resources such as drones, despite the expectation of a large crowd.
He further claimed that UVUPD never reached out to other departments to ensure sufficient officers and equipment were on hand, a basic step most Americans would assume is standard when a high-profile conservative figure draws thousands to a public campus.
According to an alleged text exchange between Harpoles team and Chief Long an image of which appears at the 56:19 mark of the Shawn Ryan podcast Harpoles security detail had flagged specific concerns about "roof access" two days before the shooting.
In that exchange, Long reportedly brushed aside those concerns with a casual assurance: "I got you covered."
After the shooting, Harpole said he and his team attempted to contact Long but received no response. "He's never called us back," Harpole claimed, underscoring what many on the right see as a troubling lack of accountability from a public official whose primary duty is campus safety, not public relations.
Harpole also urged citizens and media outlets to file public records requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act or its state equivalents to obtain all messages sent and received by Long on state-issued devices. Blaze News followed that advice and filed the appropriate requests under Utahs Government Records Access and Management Act, known as GRAMA, only to be met with delay, denial, and redactions that raise more questions than they answer.
On November 24, Blaze News submitted its first GRAMA request to UVU, seeking all of Longs messages on any messaging or social media platform between September 3 and September 11, 2025.
The university denied the request on December 4, claiming that a "person's name; mailing address; email address; and daytime telephone number" from Blaze News had supposedly not been included, despite the outlet already having a GRAMA account with UVU that contained that information.
Of particular note, Blaze News GRAMA account with UVU already stored the required contact details, though the precise date that information was entered cannot be independently verified.
The denial thus appeared less like a good-faith procedural objection and more like a pretext to avoid turning over potentially embarrassing records related to the killing of a conservative figure on a taxpayer-funded campus.
Blaze News resubmitted the request twice more. The first resubmission was received on January 14, and on February 5, UVU responded that it required "additional time to fulfill" the request due to an "extraordinary circumstance," promising completion within 10 business days.
On February 19, the university again claimed it needed another 10 business days. Then, on March 5, UVU asserted it required yet another 10 business days, effectively stringing out a relatively straightforward records search for nearly two months.
At last, on March 17, Blaze News received a mere 14 Microsoft Teams messages, all heavily redacted and largely devoid of meaningful context. None of the participants in those messages were identified by name, leaving it impossible to determine whether any of the statements could be attributed to Chief Long or other key decision-makers.
The most revealing exchange occurred at 9:15 a.m. on September 10, the morning of the shooting. A person identified only as 63G-2-305(11) wrote: "Let the fun begin! The turning point group is wondering if they can have access to drive under the hall of flags to drop off their equipment? There is a gate there that needs to be unlocked."
Part of the response from user 63G-2-305(12) was redacted, but the visible portion continued: "The two GOP guys whi [sic] visited yesterday really stirred the pot!" The remark suggests that the presence of Republican officials or staff had already unsettled some on campus, a telling detail given the ideological hostility conservatives often face at public universities.
User 63G-2-305(11) then replied with an ominous, if unwitting, prediction: "Really?! Oh no! It was weird the way they came on campus. Let's hope nothing crazy happens." The person believed to be 63G-2-305(12) responded with a breezy reassurance: "It's all good!"
Even after granting itself three separate extensions, UVU refused to provide Blaze News with any of Longs text messages from September 3 to September 11. The university argued that too much time had passed since the shooting and that locating the messages would require an unreasonable amount of work, a rationale that, if accepted, would gut the very purpose of public records laws.
UVU offered the same justification when Blaze News submitted another request for Longs texts on April 1. When Blaze News reminded the university that all of Longs messages are presumed public unless a specific GRAMA exemption applies and that mere inconvenience or the personal nature of some messages are not valid statutory exemptions UVU relented only slightly, sending 19 screenshots of minimal investigative value two weeks later.
Eight of those screenshots were simply campus-wide text alerts about the shooting. One screenshot showed a message from a local Utah reporter requesting an interview with Chief Long, a routine media inquiry that sheds no light on pre-event security decisions.
Three screenshots contained expressions of concern about individuals presumably Long or other UVUPD personnel who had endured the stress of the event, both in the planning stages and in the aftermath. Another three screenshots related to a single conversation about the possible attendance of U.S. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and John Curtis (R-Utah), again peripheral to the core questions about security failures.
Only two screenshots contained information of real public interest.
In one exchange roughly 30 minutes before Kirk was fatally shot, someone likely Long estimated that the crowd had grown to 3,000 people.
"Woah! That is pretty good! Is it okay?" the other party replied.
"Do you think there are more in support or against," the interlocutor added, but that question received no answer.
Fifteen minutes after the shooting, another message asked what should be said to the "people calling." "She said shes even gotten the new York times [sic]," the sender noted, indicating that national media were already seeking information.
"Don't give any statements," came the reply, presumably from Long.
That directive, issued in the immediate aftermath of a high-profile political assassination on a public campus, reinforces the perception that UVUs priority was message control, not transparency or accountability.
Notably absent from any of the documents UVU provided were the text messages Harpole said his team exchanged with Long about "roof access" and other security concerns. Efforts by Blaze News to reach Harpole for additional comment were unsuccessful, leaving his earlier allegations unrefuted but also unelaborated.
Blaze News is not alone in facing resistance from UVU over records related to Kirks murder. In a February 17 report titled "Utah Valley University continues to deny request for documents in Charlie Kirk shooting," local station KSTU described similar denials and revealed that suspect Tyler Robinson and his attorneys had even intervened in the GRAMA process.
KSTU reported receiving "a letter from Tyler Robinson and his attorneys in support of the university's decision to deny the release of the security plan." The outlet characterized UVUs denials as "typical of the public records process," but acknowledged that the involvement of the suspect and his legal team was "unusual."
In April, the Daily Caller News Foundation likewise reported that UVU had "heavily redacted files and withheld others entirely" in response to its own public records request. Taken together, these accounts suggest a pattern of institutional opacity that should trouble anyone who believes public universities owe the taxpayers candor, not concealment, especially when a conservative speaker is killed on their grounds.
The UVU Police Department did not respond to Blaze News request for comment regarding its limited compliance and extensive redactions. Chief Long, who joined UVUPD as deputy chief in 2022 and was elevated to chief in December 2024, received more than $125,000 in wages and benefits from taxpayers in 2024 alone, according to government disclosure documents.
Despite that generous public compensation, the most prominent conservative activist in America was shot and killed during an event under his watch. For many on the right, that fact alone demands a full accounting of what was done and what was not done to protect Kirk and the thousands who came to hear him speak.
Just hours after the shooting, Long appeared at a press conference alongside other officials, where he described himself as "devastated" and called the killing "a police chief's nightmare."
"We train for these things, and you think you have things covered, and um, you know, these things, um, you know, unfortunately they happen," he said, adding: "You try to get, you try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately today we didn't. And because of that we had this tragic incident."
Long has not made any public comments about the shooting since that day. His silence, combined with UVUs aggressive redactions and procedural delays, has only fueled speculation that serious misjudgments were made and that officials are now more interested in shielding themselves than in answering legitimate questions from the public.
Harpole told Shawn Ryan that Long bears significant responsibility for the lingering doubts about UVUs security posture on the day of the shooting. "Why he won't stand up like a man and admit this, I don't know," Harpole said of Long, "but he's watching a bunch of men lose their careers. "And he's okay with it."
For conservatives who see a pattern of institutions circling the wagons whenever their failures intersect with the targeting of right-leaning figures, UVUs behavior in the wake of Charlie Kirks assassination only deepens the concern that political bias and bureaucratic self-preservation are being placed above truth, accountability, and the safety of those who dare to speak out.
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