Beyond the Crime Log

If that uniformed, badge-wearing gentleman on the corner looks like a policeman, carries a gun like a policeman, stops, searches, questions, and arrests students and non-students alike like a policeman, and executes warrants like a policeman, then he’s probably a policeman. This is the simple logic of The Crimson’s lawsuit, filed two years ago, that asks the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) to be subject to the same open records laws all other police forces are.

That lawsuit was heard before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts last Monday; it is now the high court’s task to determine whether HUPD should continue to exist as an exception to an important rule.

Presently, Harvard claims that HUPD is something of a private militia and that public records laws therefore do not apply to it. Of course, it’s true that Harvard foots the bill for the department, but the University has no authority to confer the characteristics that make it a “police department.”

HUPD officers individually, rather than collectively, enjoy police powers—the authority to stop, question, detain, formally arrest, use force, and interrogate suspects—not because University Hall wills it to be so, but because they are recognized police under the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and its officers are deputized by the Middlesex and Suffolk County sheriffs and the colonel of the state police. If HUPD seeks this extra power—which few other campus police offficers enjoy—it is only fair that they accept the reporting responsibilities when they swear allegiance to uphold the Constitution of the Commonwealth and not simply the policies of the University.

HUPD and the University’s Office of General Counsel have tried to resolve this issue by releasing daily crime logs and aggregate crime statistics—which, in any case, the law compels them to do—but they have refused to make public incident reports which, if filed by a municipal police department or county sheriff, would be unquestionably public.

The University argues that the records’ release would compromise privacy. The Crimson, however, has never expressed a desire to have every single piece of information HUPD generates; HUPD, like other police forces, could redact names of victims to protect their anonymity.

Other police departments do not have the authority to release incident reports selectively. Although the University claims HUPD is being as open as possible, the present situation prevents the public from even knowing what HUPD is withholding. Police reports might gesture to trends in police activity; keeping them from the public eye hampers The Crimson’s and others’ ability to do investigative reporting that asks important questions. Among the benefits the Harvard community could hope to gain from greater University openness are a more complete knowledge of crime trends and information on why people are stopped, questioned, and arrested.

Over the past few years, the University has complied with information requests on an ad hoc basis — last year, the school released aggregate suicide statistics that allowed The Crimson to expand its mental health coverage.

But this ad hoc system is precisely the problem: we are beholden to the goodwill of an administration that has the potential to be open one moment and cloistered the next. What happens when The Crimson tries to uncover a trend that is not already on the University agenda? Viewing HUPD as the professional police force it is claimed to be, and not merely a private security detail, requires it to be treated as its “real world” counterparts are. We hope the Supreme Judicial Court will agree.