Bill May Force HUPD to Release Full Reports

The State Senate yesterday passed a bill that would force the Harvard University Police Department to make public its detailed incident reports, setting the stage for a fight in the House of Representatives between police watchdog groups and private colleges.

If the legislation passes the House and is signed into law by Governor Mitt Romney, HUPD and other private university police forces would join state and local police in releasing their reports publicly.

The bill’s success would also render moot a decision handed down by Massachusetts’ highest court in January, when the Supreme Judicial Court struck down a suit brought by The Crimson against Harvard. The newspaper had argued that private university police are bound by the same public records laws as their publicly-funded peers.

HUPD’s force includes officers who are deputized by the Middlesex and Suffolk County sheriffs and who are sworn special state police.

At present, the only crime information released by HUPD is a brief summary in an online police log. A campus security watchdog group says that’s not enough.

“Without this bill, members of the Harvard community will continue to be denied critical campus crime report information that their peers at public colleges get,” S. Daniel Carter, a senior vice president at Security on Campus, said yesterday.

“For example, you’d get details about suspects who are accused of, say, committing a robbery, whereas in a crime log situation you get information that there was a robbery reported,” Carter said.

Carter has spearheaded the legislation, along with the Student-Alumni Committee on Institutional Security Policy, a local watchdog group, since the bill’s inception in 2004.

But Harvard has opposed the current legislation on the grounds that releasing more information would endanger the privacy of students.

“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,” a University spokesman, Joe Wrinn, told The Crimson in February 2005. Wrinn could not be reached for comment last night.

Not only does the legislation pit a Harvard student newspaper against the University, but it also carries the imprimatur of a Harvard alum.

State Senator Jarrett T. Barrios ’90, D.-Cambridge, introduced the legislation into the Senate. And the House’s Ways and Means Committee is currently considering a corresponding bill, sponsored by two Cambridge Democrats, Representatives Alice Wolf and Timothy Toomey.

None of the sponsors could be reached for comment last night.

The House will now consider either the version of the bill passed by the Senate, or the one sponsored by Wolf and Toomey.

If the House bill passes, it will have to be signed into law by Romney. Calls last night to the governor’s press office were not returned.

The Crimson has lobbied for Barrios’ legislation at the State House, and The Crimson’s president, William C. Marra ’07, said last night that the bill’s swift passage through the legislature and across the governor’s desk would benefit students at private universities statewide.

“The passing of the legislation would enhance the safety of students on campus by providing them the detailed police incident reports that our peers at public institutions already have,” Marra said. “The information will help students better monitor crime on campus.”

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.