A Night Out Patrolling the Harvard Beat

Out of uniform, Amy DiVirgilio can easily be mistaken for a student walking in the Yard. The thin, 5-foot 5-inch 25-year-old with dangling earrings and brown hair pulled back in a ponytail appears to be just like any college student.

But that’s before she dons a bullet-proof vest and the uniform of the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), and straps on her gun belt, filled with a baton, two-way radio, pepper spray, handcuffs and a nine millimeter Glock 22 handgun.

Then she climbs behind the wheel of an HUPD cruiser to begin her eight-hour shift keeping the campus safe. Each shift is different, and she never knows what any night will bring. Tonight, thankfully, is quiet.

7:19 p.m.—DiVirgilio obtains permission from the watch commander to leave her normal patrol zone around the Radcliffe Quad and patrol “all sectors.”

The 4 p.m.-midnight shift that DiVirgilio works is HUPD’s largest—and, often, its busiest.

Her nightly patrols take her from the Somerville line to the Charles River and beyond into the Business School campus in Allston. The land travelled is familiar territory to her.

She grew up just 15 miles from Harvard Square—although the journey from her home to Harvard has been a long and indirect one.

DiVirgilio says she never aspired to be a police officer—she says she was not assertive enough growing up to be one. However, she has always wanted to help people.

“I was always trying to assist someone else, even if it meant my life would be turned upside down,” says DiVirgilio, who, as a teenager, used to buy 15 Big Macs from McDonald’s and distribute them to homeless people in Harvard Square.

As a college senior, DiVirgilio was majoring in economics and planning a career in international business—until she realized that she was on a path to spend the rest of her life in an office building.

Instead, after graduation, she decided to enlist in the Marines. Six months after that, instead of entering flight school and committing herself to eight-and-a-half-years with the Marines, DiVirgilio returned home.

“I was thinking, ‘What if I want to get married? Will I drag my husband from base to base?’ And I knew I couldn’t have children and fly,” she recounts.

When she found that HUPD was hiring, she decided to apply.

After obtaining a position with HUPD, DiVirgilio attended the state police academy in Quincy, Mass.

“I had fun. I’d go back any day if I got paid for it,” she says. “Not that I enjoy ironing. That was the worst part.”

New HUPD officers constituted a large portion of her class, and so graduation was held in Sanders Theatre in April 1999. The 13 new officers were the first class brought in under the new vision of

“community-oriented policing” by HUPD Chief Francis D. “Bud” Riley. Riley hand-picked them for their diversity, life experience and their ability to connect with the Harvard community. She’s been patrolling ever since.

HUPD has a higher proportion of female officers than most police departments—roughly a dozen of the department’s 60-odd officers are female.

Despite her role in a male-dominated occupation and her small size, almost nothing alarms DiVirgilio.

“The way I see what I do is this—I know I’m five foot five inches and a girl and I don’t weight lift for my arms everyday. I’m not as strong as a man. But when I’m at work, I keep my head on my shoulders,” she says.

7:40 p.m.—The HUPD dispatcher radios for DiVirgilio to investigate an alarm at Memorial Church. The alarm had gone off and then quickly reset. HUPD will investigate anyway.

DiVirgilio says that responding to emergency calls doesn’t faze her.

“I don’t worry about risking my life. I can get back-up and I know I have plenty of tools on my belt,” she says as she turns on her siren and speeds through the streets of Cambridge.

The University has close to 300 alarms—burglar, fire and panic—all of which are monitored by HUPD dispatchers at the department’s 1033 Mass. Ave. headquarters. In a given week, officers will respond to about 70 alarm calls.

Tonight, she arrives at the Church and finds everything okay. The patrol continues.

DiVirgilio spends a lot of her time on patrol checking on restored alarms—ones that go off and then quickly reset. She describes it as an important but sometimes frustrating task.

“Once there was a vent with a string attached and the motion detector kept picking up the string and setting off the alarm. We got the same alarm call three times in one day,” DiVirgilio laughs.

8:40 p.m.—DiVirgilio happens upon a minor chemical spill in the labs on Oxford Street. The Cambridge Fire Department is already there, and the situation appears to be under control. She moves on.

For now, DiVirgilio says she is very happy at HUPD and has no urge to change jobs. Like all patrol officers, she works four days and then has two days off, allowing her the weekend off only once every six weeks.

Depending on the weather and the department’s needs, she could find herself working undercover or patrolling in a car or on a mountain bike.

The bikes are more fun, she says, and its “easier to catch people doing things wrong.”

For example, she recounts a recent incident involving a “peeping tom” outside Greenough Hall. The responding officer purposefully chose the bike, and was able to ride right up to the suspect before he noticed the officer.

While DiVirgilio struggles to remember her funniest call, she says that humorous incidents occur almost daily.

“My partner and I have been to so many calls where we look at each other afterwards and we’re like, ‘How hard was that to hold in until the end of the call?’” she says with a laugh.

9:05 p.m.—DiVirgilio races to Gund Hall on reports of a design school student who fainted but has since regained consciousness. He declines medical attention.

One of the most unique aspects of DiVirgilio’s work is her role as the instructor of the department’s Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) course. The course offers females at the University—students and staff alike—the chance to learn and practice self-defense techniques.

“People learn to trust HUPD more after they take RAD classes,” says DiVirgilio, adding that many of her former students ask to speak to her directly when they need police assistance.

Although she’s only taught the course for a couple of years, it has already paid dividends.

One graduate of the course was attacked during a trip overseas and successfully defended herself. When she returned to Harvard, she sent cookies to HUPD with a card attached that read: “Thank you. RAD turned out to be helpful to me when I was studying abroad.”

Even DiVirgilio has used the techniques she teaches in RAD. A year ago, she says, one of the College’s student groups called HUPD to remove an “unwanted guest.”

When DiVirgilio and her back-up arrived at the scene, the “unwanted guest” shouted obscenities at her and would only speak rationally to her male back-up.

“Finally, the guy tried to jump me,” she says. “I shoved him back and pushed him onto the ground. That was that.”

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.