HUPD: About Time For Transparency

Transparency has been a long time coming. In 2003, The Crimson filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, demanding that the Harvard University Police Department release its crime reports to the public. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the newspaper argued that Harvard’s police should be subject to state public records laws like all municipal police forces. Three years later, in 2006 and after protracted litigation, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled unanimously in favor of Harvard, citing HUPD’s status as a private police force. In doing so, the court dealt a major blow to this newspaper’s and others’ calls for greater police transparency. The University’s argument that HUPD is different from other police forces because its governance and rules fell under the auspices of an educational institution and were designed to protect students’ privacy, were deemed valid. At the time, The Crimson argued that legislation should proceed to correct an anomaly that allowed Harvard and other Massachusetts universities following Harvard’s lead to block sufficient public access to law enforcement data.

This year, five years after that judgment, a bill has been introduced in the Massachusetts House of Representatives precisely to this effect. Bill H.1740 would require “records, reports or other documentary materials or data made or received for the purpose of law enforcement by a special state police officer of a college” to be subject to the same disclosure rules municipal police departments face. This would, of course, apply to HUPD, which currently just releases a daily police log and annual statistics. To date, the bill has passed the state Senate and is in committee in the House. The Crimson has long argued and campaigned for holding Harvard’s authorities to the same exacting standards of transparency and accountability as their peers across the country. The House of Representatives should pass this bill in its current form and put an end to an anomalous and troubling disconnect between HUPD and its neighboring police forces. HUPD and the Cambridge Police Department patrol side-by-side, often in the same areas, and hence deal with the same problems. It simply does not make sense for them to be subject to different disclosure rules.

As members of the public and of our campus community, as well as in our role as journalists, The Crimson staff has long argued that institutional accountability should be of the utmost importance. The case for HUPD transparency has never been founded on a suspicion that Harvard’s police force deserves particularly harsh scrutiny. Rather, HUPD should be subject to the same disclosure rules as other forces because transparency and accountability in policing are virtues themselves. The fact that Harvard is a college campus should not obscure the reality that our police force functions as any other and ought to be treated as such.

In the case of police forces especially, more transparency ought to constitute a positive development. In normal circumstances, journalists and other interested members of the public can and should use police reports to identify and put together a more coherent narrative of the crimes that take place in our community. Reporters and citizens attempting to identify more precisely the locations that can be deemed crime hotspots and what sorts of activity are repeated at these locations can never get anywhere near the full picture from truncated logs.

Harvard has argued in the past that greater disclosure of police activity on campus would be detrimental to students, but Harvard’s attempted defense of students does not quite add up. When other police departments release reports and records, they routinely redact specific identifying information related to crimes. If the state were to compel HUPD to release more information, it is not clear how student privacy will be compromised.

Overall, a community stands only to benefit from more holistic access to reports of incidents and police action. Police accountability and transparency are nationwide issues that unite many journalists, activists, and members of the public from across the spectrum. Massachusetts’ legislation comes as a welcome development, and we look forward to its passing and implementation.