Opening Police Records Saves Lives

Our family learned the hard way that what you do not know about campus crime can kill you. We lost our beloved daughter, Jeanne, in 1986 when she was brutally raped and murdered at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania by a fellow student with a violent history.

He had been able to gain entry to her residence hall room because students did not know about a history of violent crime on the campus and did not take precautions to avoid victimization, like not leaving doors propped open with pizza boxes. Students were never warned about this history of campus crime. They never even had a chance to protect themselves. Unfortunately, we did not find out about any of this until after Jeanne’s murder.

Image-conscious schools to this day want to maintain the image of the “Ivory Tower” as a safe haven and will do anything to keep their campus crime records secret. The contention of the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) that they are not a public agency is just another pathetic excuse to perpetuate this illusion. Students and other members of the Harvard campus community deserve no less information about crime than other citizens receive in their hometowns.

Harvard is in a “high crime” sector of Cambridge. Yet Harvard is in court arguing for the right to provide less crime information than any local police agency in Massachusetts.

Harvard has chosen to handle crimes internally by establishing a police department rather than referring all crimes to the local police. Part of Harvard’s motivation, however, has nothing to do with providing greater protection for the campus. Harvard wants to keep campus crime secret. Otherwise, it would be willing to operate under the exact same standards of public accountability that local police do.

But Harvard must not be allowed to get away with this. The price for establishing a campus police department is that it must operate in the same way any other police department would. There must not be an abuse of power that allows campus crimes to be dealt with in the shadows. Doing so is a potentially deadly mistake.

It is so very important that campus police information be shared publicly in part because as much as 80 percent of campus violence is actually student-on-student violence, as Congress found when it adopted a campus crime reporting law named in our daughter’s memory—the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act. Students accused of serious violent conduct will continue to inhabit the same campus with other students, who become unwitting potential victims.

Harvard is effectively arguing for the right to provide less crime protection than any other citizen receives. Federal courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional for states to allow differently-situated citizens to be provided with unequal police protection.

They have also held that allowing a law enforcement agency serving one group of citizens to withhold information that other agencies must disclose affords unequal information about criminal suspects and thus unequal protection. Any state law that would appear to allow this type of unequal disclosure should be squarely challenged as unconstitutional.

Harvard’s current policy means that students do not get all of the information they need to protect themselves from serious threats to their own safety. Students have no way of knowing, for example, that the person sitting next to them in class, or in a study group, may be an accused rapist.

In any other community, accused citizens—including college-aged young people—would find their names in local newspaper headlines. On campus, however, they get special protection that has no rational or real legal basis. The only distinction in law for students is in the tax code, where they are categorized as nonproductive members of society. Students should not be afforded any special exemption from public scrutiny when they are accused of a crime just because they happen to be smart enough to attend Harvard.

Annual crime statistics and abbreviated police log information just are not enough to provide the complete picture about campus crime that students need to have to make informed decisions about avoiding victimization. Details about the crime, as well as how the authorities have responded, are critical.

If HUPD and other campus police departments will not admit the error of their ways, the courts and the Massachusetts legislature need to see to it that they have no choice. Harvard’s top priority ought to be protecting the campus community, not ensuring the “privacy” of those accused of serious criminal misconduct just because many happen to be Harvard students. If Jeanne had known about the history of violent crime, she might still be alive today.

Howard K. Clery and Constance B. Clery are co-founders of Security On Campus, Inc.