The Next Step

The recent decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) to deny The Crimson access to incident reports produced by officers of the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) is disappointing. While we respect the legal rationale that led the SJC to deny The Crimson its request for free access to this information, the quality of our coverage of campus events heavily depends on our ability to acquire HUPD records that relate to matters of campus-wide importance. To that end, we support efforts by Massachusetts State Senator Jarrett T. Barrios and Representative Timothy J. Toomey to pass legislation that will oblige campus police departments to follow the same free-access policies that already apply to public police departments.

In the lawsuit, Harvard argued that the HUPD, as a private entity, should not have to divulge internal records. The SJC agreed with this argument, finding that the state law governing free-access standards does distinguish between public and private police forces. But the pertinent distinction in this matter should not rest on who signs a police officer’s paychecks. Instead, the pertinent distinction should separate those who are deputized with state police powers from those who are not. From the vantage point of any local civilian—be it a Harvard student or a Cambridge resident—there is simply no practical difference between a HUPD officer and a Cambridge police officer. Both are vested with the power to make arrests and execute search warrants, among other things. That the HUPD should retain these powers is, of course, obvious—the enhanced authority of HUPD officers makes Harvard a safer community. We only argue that the HUPD, as an agency that does retain these state police powers, should be subject to the same standards that apply to any other police force in the Commonwealth.

The Crimson is not seeking access to these records so that it will be able to publish sensitive personal information about specific individuals. Instead, we are seeking to gain a better sense of, among other important issues, the frequency of sexual abuse and racial profiling on campus. These are matters that concern all members of the Harvard community. Without access to incident reports compiled by HUPD officers (as opposed to the heavily-filtered police logs that, at present, represent the limit of our access to HUPD records), we simply cannot fulfill our mission to fully inform our readership about the issues that impact the Harvard community.

We recognize that the SJC’s ruling marks the end of our legal battle. But the legal battle is only one front of our campaign to apply sensible free-access standards to the HUPD’s records. The legislation proposed by Barrios and Toomey, if passed by the full Massachusetts legislature, will accomplish this task by explicitly applying free-access standards to campus police departments statewide. The bill has already been favorably assessed by the Senate Rules Committee and the State Administration Committee. When the bill will be introduced to the full legislature is unclear, but when it does, the legislature will have to decide an important question: should the operations of some deputized police officers be veiled simply because they work for a private police force, or should we demand free access to evaluate the work of all police officers? The answer, we believe, is clear.