The Harvard University Police: Walking The Fine Line Between Cop and Caretaker

"In fact, the University Police are a paradox. . . . They must serve in an environment where formal authority is consciously minimized and camouflaged."

Students are introduced to the University Police during their first two weeks in the Yard. Summoned to their proctor's room for a first meeting, freshmen sip beer in awed silence while their advisor discourses casually on the Freshman Year at Harvard. He dispatches quickly with incidentals like study cards, course requirements, and grades and gets down to the essentials of Yard life.

First, there are parietals. Personally he doesn't give a damn what you do, but the University Police would catch you if he didn't; so for your own sake he's going to enforce the rules. (Vision of uniformed guards hiding in shadows or peering around corners, flashlights poised.) And then there are the spring rio's . If you get in one and get caught make sure it's a University cop and not a Cambridge policemen. The campus cops understand. Nine times out of ten they let you off. (Vision of a friendly, protective smile and perhaps a finger waved gently in paternal reprimand.)

On this contradictory note, the meeting dissolves with the offer of another beer, and the new arrival retreats to his room, wondering, among other things, precisely whose side the University Police are on. Future experience, in the Yard or beyond, rarely clears up the mystery; for, in fact, the University Police are a paradox in concept and in function. They serve as a uniformed police organization in an environment where formal authority is consciously minimized and camouflaged. And in the last five years, the "campus cops" have become more like a police force while remaining something very different.

Robert Tonis, Chief of the University Police, symbolizes the force's two sides. For 27 years, he was an F.B.I. agent and a supervisor of criminal investigation in the Boston Region. Tall and rugged, he can rattle off the where's, who's, and how's of gangland murders in a jargon that makes Eliot Nesse sound like Little Joe Cartwright.

But in 1962 Tonis voluntarily retired from active law enforcement to sit behind a desk in the complex of sparsely furnished offices and whitened brick hallways under Grays Hall. "I guess I enjoy being in an academic atmosphere", says Tonis only half in jest. He graduated from Dartmouth and B.U. Law School before joining the F.B.I.

In the five years since Tonis became chief, the University Police force has grown larger and more professional. In June 1965, at the request of Radcliffe and the Med School, the Police replaced the night watchman service patrolling the two campuses. The additions gave the organization responsibility for guarding the entire University, 24 hours a day. To meet new demands, the central headquarters in Grays Hall opened two branch posts, one in each of the new areas, and the force expanded from 39 to 60 men.

The expansion went smoothly, partly because Tonis had already begun tightening the Police organization. He applied an old F.B.I. standard and eliminated specialization on the force. Insisting on a regular rotation of assignments, he made sure that men became familiar with each of the five patrolling areas at Harvard. "Some of the men had been standing in the same spot for 15 years," Tonis recalls. "They thought they were going to die. But it worked out great." Tonis saw to it that all men learned the same basic skills, and the rotation included the 13 officers on the force (one captain, two lieutenants, and ten sergeants) who also take periodic desk assignments at Grays Hall and the other branch headquarters.

Tonis made other changes. He kept the central office open 24 hours a day and equipped the men with one-way pocket radios constantly in touch with Grays Hall. Finally, he standardized the type of gun used by the force. Previously officers had carried several kinds, but all had trained with a 32-calibre pistol. The new chief saw to it that the men carried the standard police gun, a 38-calibre pistol, and trained with the same model.

In June, 1966, the force took its greatest step in the direction of full police status. Several years ago, a campus policeman at Tufts made an arrest on the Tufts campus, a right later challenged by the arrested man's lawyer. Court action led to a Massachusetts state law which provided university police "with the same power to make arrests as regular police officers for any criminal offense committed in or upon lands owned, used, or occupied" by the university. The Harvard University Police were the first in the state sworn in under the new statute.

The University Police, then, have acquired new responsibilities and a new efficiency. But they have no illusions about how powerful or professional they are. "We're not a police department," Tonis is quick to point cut. "Our interest is physical security."

University policemen are not hardened law enforcers. Tonis is one of the few with a background in police work (one man, a retired army colonel, was warden of a prison for German war criminals after the last war). Recruits come largely from within the Harvard community. They include librarians, janitors, and maintenance men, and the primary criterion for their selection is their "ability to get along with people." Tonis interviews as many as 50 applicants for one vacancy. The job is considered a good one and pays relatively well; no one has quit in the last five years.

Training is not long or extensive. New officers get on the job instruction for a month, working in each area with an experienced man. They receive limited instruction in arrest procedures, testifying in court, report writing and gun-handling, but most emphasis is placed on learning first aid techniques. Twenty-seven men, however, are voluntarily taking a course in Criminal Law and Investigation taught by a professor from the College of Criminal Law at North-eastern.

Police activities are geared, in Tonis' words, to the "protection of Harvard's property and personnel." In practice, this amounts to a combination of caretaking and emergency service, with a minimum of what could be termed police work. A routine shift involves turning on and off lights, and checking broken locks, windows, or suspiciously open doors. The force's three station wagon cruisers are used almost exclusively for transporting emergency cases to the health services, though at Radcliffe, their mere presence is an effective deterrent to the "peeping toms" who used to plague the Radcliffe dorms.

Of course, the "protective" role of the Police inevitably involved them in some cops and robbery. Campus police will ask trespassers for identification, and if necessary make arrests and support their action in court. Tonis' force also takes responsibility for investigating thefts in the University, and Captain Walsh, the single captain, is a plainclothesman whose special job is inquiring into stolen property.

Actual arrests, however, are rare. The University Police approach their duties with a flexibility impossible in a professional agency of law enforcement. Officers always warn offenders before taking more serious action.

And the University Police rarely get their man. To begin with, on campus crimes are usually of the petty and chronic variety that defies solution--stolen pocket-books (100 percent carelessness, Tonis affirms) and in the spring, bicycles. But most important, a campus-bound security force simply lacks the time, men, and training to do serious police work. Even Walsh, despite his clothing, does little real snooping. "He is not," Tonis admits with a trace of a smile, "like a James Bond or a private eye."

Tonis and his men consider their role in student discipline a minor one, and they approach it with restraint. "We try to say yes," says Tonis. "We don't often say no."

Of course sometimes the "no" is inevitable. Tonis has a healthy dread of the legendary "spring riot," and more bursar's cards numbers are taken at such gatherings than anywhere else (contrary to popular myth, the police rarely take cards, since numbers are enough to identify students).

But in other areas, the police are more flexible. Students and police most often rub shoulders over parking problems, and students are allowed just two warnings and four tickets (one five dollars, the next three ten dollars) before their violations are reported to the administration, an action which may bring loss of driving privileges. The police, however, give out tickets only on Harvard University property, not on Cambridge streets; and even then, says Tonis, "You should be able to talk'em out of it. They're not out to get you. They don't get brownie points for tags."

Police patrol outside of buildings, entering only for emergencies or to quiet unruly students. They discover parietal violations by seeing students leaving with dates after hours, not through pass-key espionage. There is no regular surveillance of final lubs or societies, and there are no definite rules saying when police should intervene in student affairs. Officers use their own discretion.

The Police take absolutely no part in administering punishment to students. Names of students offenders are handed immediately to Dean Monro or Dean Von Staade, and the matter then passes out of Police hands. Though officers must record any serious problems in the daily reports which form the police log, the Police keep no files on students or student offenders.

But there is also a much more positive side to police-student relations. The force serves as an effective buffer between students and the Cambridge police, who have the authority to enter the University but "out of courtesy" leave Harvard to the University Police. Cambridge authorities will often hand drunken students wandering in the Square to the University cops, rather than let them spend the night in jail. And with University Police handling student demonstrations, students get much more flexible supervision than the Cambridge police would provide.

On occasion (most often during spring riots) campus police will request Cambridge help. The Cambridge police answer the call, but both parties regard such intervention as a courtesy service rather than an assertion of authority. University cops just as frequently help out their Cambridge counterparts. Last Thanksgiving, eight University policemen battled high-school rioters in the Square when Cambridge Police found themselves undermanned. "We have a good working relationship," says Tonis. "They can help us and we can help them."

The University Police also provide students with personal and unofficial services. Dean Monro often sends students in trouble to Chief Tonis, whose law degree enables him to serve as "a semi-legal authority." And one senior remembers when his wallet was stolen on a Saturday night his Freshman year. The policeman on duty asked him if he had a date, and when the student replied that he did and had no money, the officer lent him ten dollars and told him "to bring it back sometime.