If Bill Passes, HUPD May Have To Reveal More Crime Details

The Harvard Crimson’s current lawsuit against the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) may ultimately prove futile if a bill currently in front of the Massachusetts State Legislature is signed into law.

If passed, the act would allow individuals to obtain the same type of detailed crime information from police forces at private universities that is currently only provided by public university and city police departments.

Under the current law, special police departments, such as HUPD, do not release incident reports—in part to protect the privacy of victims within a small community.

These incident reports—which public police forces (like the Cambridge Police Department) are required to disclose—contain statements from victims, witnesses, police officers who reported to the scene, and other detailed information about a given crime.

Currently, the information available to the public from HUPD includes the few-sentence incident summaries published daily in the online police log, in addition to the community advisory warnings sent to all students via e-mail after incidents of violent crimes.

But some members of police watchdog groups don’t want to risk the possibility hat The Crimson’s lawsuit and its attempt to gain access to these reports won’t survive its appeal. Instead, they are pushing for increased access to crime information themselves, foregoing the courtroom drama for parliamentary procedure.

“In our experience, the legislature is more expedient than the courts to get access to this information,” says S. Daniel Carter, a Senior Vice President for Security on Campus, a non-profit group that aims to improve security on college campuses.

STALCOMM-POLITICKING

Ironically, the impetus for the legislation came from a statement that Middlesex Superior Court Justice Nancy Staffier issued in her March 2004 dismissal of The Crimson’s lawsuit.

While she did not rule in favor of The Crimson, she said that the issue at hand would be “a matter best left for the legislature to consider.”

Carter, who is based in Tennessee, teamed up with James “Jake” Herms, one of HUPD’s most virulent critics, to conceive such a law.

Herms is the founder of the local watchdog group Student-Alumni Committee on Institutional Security Policy (StalCommPol). The organization, which is not affiliated with Harvard, made headlines in March of 2004 when it released a study that said Harvard students are more likely to be victims of violent crime than students at other comparable institutions.

However, the group’s study faced scrutiny from HUPD for using misleading methods of data analysis.

Herms’ work has been made more difficult because of a trespass order filed against him in the fall of 2003 after he allegedly made inappropriate comments to students.

Though the order bars him from campus, Herms has not let it stop him from getting involved in Harvard’s affairs. And Carter has not let Herms’ past deter their partnership.

Together, the two decided to take the issue of public records access out of the courts.

“The judge recommended legislation to take the issue up,” Carter says. “This is something we’ve been in support of for a long time.”

In the summer of 2004, Carter came to Boston and met with StalCommPol to assist the group in understanding the basics of creating the legislation.

Carter suggested that Herms contact Mass. State Senator Jarrett T. Barrios ’90, D.-Cambridge, who is also the chair of the Senate Committee on Public Safety. After the bill was passed along to Barrios, who introduced it to the State Senate, Representative Alice Wolf, D.-Middlesex, co-sponsored the bill in the house, along with Representative Tim Toomey, D.-Middlesex.

Wolf says that the legislation is necessary because HUPD, who are deputized by Middlesex County, can carry a gun and arrest people, and not all campus police officers have that authority.

“Police power is an awesome power, so it should not be exercised behind closed doors,” Wolf says. “They have a lot of responsibility in their hands.”

Wolf also says that Harvard has an obligation to the greater community.

“A university is not a separate kingdom,” Wolf says. “It has to relate to a community and people have to be able to get adequate information to have adequate protection.”

MORAL REASONING 5-0

University spokesman Joe Wrinn says that Harvard’s position on the current legislation is consistent with their stance in the lawsuit that is currently pending with The Crimson (See story Page A1).

The University has argued in court that increased access to police reports puts a victim’s privacy at risk.

Wrinn says the initial dismissal of The Crimson’s suit last March confirmed the University’s position that “the law as it currently stands appropriately takes into account the respect for individuals’ privacy and concerns about safety.”

The functions of the HUPD are fundamentally different from public police departments, Wrinn says. For example, they include transports to University Health Services, he says.

And while events such as these generate incident reports, they are also likely to “contain highly personal information,” Wrinn says. “Within the small campus environment, the information contained in an incident report would make it easier for a person’s identity to be either known or assumed by others.”

“When HUPD officers perform their state functions and arrest someone for a crime, that information is fully reported to a state entity and is available for anyone to see,” says HUPD spokesman Steven G. Catalano. “[But] when HUPD officers perform private functions, often involving the need for medical attention, that information is not disclosed and should not be disclosed.”

But Carter says access to incident reports would also make police more accountable.

“You might get a better sense of how the police have responded and whether they’re doing enough,” Carter says.

Catalano disagrees that this accountability is needed, saying HUPD already meets professional standards.

“This is basically an unanswerable question involving an untenable standard that Carter neither establishes nor enunciates,” Catalano says. “HUPD reflects the professional standards of delivery of safety and security through community policing. This involves knowing their community, caring about its well-being, and responding and following through on criminal and non-criminal incidents appropriately and professionally.”

In the past, Harvard has cited concern for student privacy as the main reason why HUPD and other private campus police forces should be an exception to public records law.

But the bill’s proponents do not find the privacy argument compelling.

“On its face this might sound good, but the flip side is that students get less crime information than members of the greater community,” Carter says.

“I have read through the [proposed] Massachusetts act and there are extensive privacy protections for individuals” he adds. “An individual’s personal, or medical information is not subject to release under the public records law now, as I understand it, or under the pending legislation.”

Carter says that he cannot predict whether or not opposition to the bill will materialize in the legislature, but he says that any that arises will tout the value of protecting victim privacy.

Wolf said even if the bill musters enough support, it won’t be signed into law until the end of the year, at the earliest.

Nevertheless, Carter is confident about the chances of the law’s passage. He says that Security on Campus is generally successful at effecting legal change.

“We’ve been responsible for the passage of over 30 federal and state laws,” he says.

WHY MORE INFORMATION?

Carter says that the new legislation would benefit college campuses because individuals would have a better sense of crime on campus and would be able to hold HUPD accountable for its security policy.

Under the new legislation, incident reports would only be released if an individual asks for them.

“If nobody asks for it,” Herms says, “then nobody is interested and the report will never have to be made public.”

However, Herms says that students should have a vested interest in obtaining detailed crime information.

“I think it’s going to be very healthy for students to take responsibility for their own safety,” Herms says.

Carter agrees that additional disclosure of information is essential for student and community evaluation of policing practices.

“You might get a better sense of how the police have responded and whether they’re doing enough,” Carter says. “No school, college or university wants to be known as a dangerous campus...They don’t have any incentive to be truly forthright.”

Catalano says, however, that sufficient information is already available to the public.

“Carter and Herms do a disservice to the community suggesting that this occurs,” Catalano says. “When someone is arrested for a crime, information pertaining to that incident is available to the public under the current law.”

The only exception to Harvard’s tight-lipped policy is the University’s thorough sexual harassment reporting, which Carter characterizes as “probably the best in the nation.”

Herms concedes that one of his primary motives is to reverse a Harvard policy that replaced union security guards with outsourced non-union guards. By having access to more information about crime across campus, Herms says he hopes to demonstrate a direct correlation between outsourced guards and increased crime.

But Catalano says the incident reports are unlikely to show any such correlation.

“Herms has absolutely no basis for saying that there is any correlation between outsourcing and crime, and we have not seen any correlation,” Catalano says. “Herms is concentrating on one previous system of security at Harvard. Policing has evolved and improved over time. Policing at Harvard now is based on the standards of community policing which is built upon increased numbers of professional police officers who become familiar with an area and its residents.”

—Staff writer Sarah E.F. Milov scan be reached at milov@fas.harvard.edu.