Police at private universities will be held to a new transparency standard if a bill requiring colleges to make all law enforcement records public passes the State House.
The Massachusetts Campus Crime Information bill, which would require police at private colleges across the commonwealth to disclose the same records as municipal and state police forces, passed the joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight April 17.
A recent ruling by Connecticut's Freedom of Information Commission mandated that the Yale University Police Department meet the same sunshine standards as state and local police departments -- a decision openness advocates have pointed to as a victory in the decades-long fight for increased campus crime accountability.
Members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Crime Club compared the Massachusetts Campus Crime Information bill to the Yale ruling in a statement, claiming both will make private university police subject to the same disclosure rules that other police, including those at public colleges, have complied with since 1973.
Rep. Alice Wolf, a Cambridge Democrat, said she has proposed laws similar to the one currently up for consideration on Beacon Hill. Harvard University students, angry about safety information school police refused to disclose, have petitioned for her support, she said.
"I don't know why campus police shouldn't be more open when they cover more than just the campus," she said.
Legislation Wolf had supported was sent into study, which "is like going into the wastebasket," at the legislature she said.
David Coulier, a representative for the Society of Professional Journalists, compared the operation of private police to the ways to Communist Russia.
In Massachusetts, police at private colleges train with state and local officers and patrol campus areas, but are required to release less detailed information to the public than their municipal and public school counterparts.
"They say, 'trust us,' but we have seen what happens when they disobey our trust," Coulier said.
Among those suspicious of campus police is the American Civil Liberties Union. The group filed a Freedom of Information Act request to determine whether photographs taken by plainclothes Harvard police officers during a March 3 protest were given to the federal government for intelligence-gathering purposes.
The ACLU wants to know what Harvard is doing with the pictures and why they were taken, ACLU-Massachusetts spokesman Chris Ott said. The ACLU questions whether Harvard is sharing information, as other universities around the country have, with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. Harvard denies having an undercover unit and does not participate in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Harvard spokesman Joe Wrinn said in a statement to the Boston Globe.
"Why is it that Harvard has undercover police photographing people peacefully protesting?" Ott said. "We would like to know about what is being done with the photos. Ultimately, they owe an answer to the Harvard community."
A law like the proposed Campus Crime Information Bill would require Harvard police to make documents, including the protest pictures, available to the public.
Campus police and student newspapers have clashed over records access for years. The Collegian, the University of Richmond's student newspaper, sued campus police in 1991 to obtain information about on-campus crimes, Collegian news editor Megan Wilson said. Following a court ruling, police made names and all other crime-related information available to the public.
The university's student government requested the court overturn the ruling because students' names were being printed in relation to embarrassing crimes in the paper's crime logs, Wilson said. Now, the URPD does not release the names of students to the public, despite the 1991 lawsuit.
Adam Goldstein, attorney advocate at the Student Press Law Center, said most private universities do not go beyond federal requirements to publish police records.
"It is an us-versus-them mentality," he said. "They don't want to make the university look bad."
Openness laws typically follow on-campus tragedies because parents, faculty and students, looking to increase safety and awareness, want to know the same information as the police, Goldstein said.
"There will have to be more bodies before we get better laws," he said. "Until someone dies, there is no change."
Coulier said the 1986 rape and murder of Jeanne Clery in her Lehigh University dorm room led lawmakers to pass the Clery Act in 1990, which requires all schools to disclose information about crimes occurring on or near campus in order to receive federal funding.
Clery's parents, co-founders of Security on Campus, Inc., alleged Lehigh had neglected to report previous campus crimes in an effort to protect its image, according to their statement on the group's website.
"A rapist only got into the dorm to kill [Jeanne Clery] because the door was propped open," Coulier said. "The students wouldn't have left the door open if the police had not hidden the threat."
Boston University complies with the Clery Act by notifying students and parents of emergencies, and won the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety award in 1996 from Security on Campus for outstanding leadership in fighting campus crime.
BU Police Department Sgt. Jack St. Hilaire said the department goes "above and beyond the law," by following the same protocols as municipal police departments.
However, following an October collision, in which a BUPD cruiser making an illegal turn on Commonwealth Avenue struck a pedestrian, student reporters were unable to obtain a detailed report of the incident.
John Doherty, representative of Security on Campus, Inc., a backer of the Massachusetts bill, said the bill will likely pass because it provides checks and balances that the system lacks.
"After the bill passes, campus police will not have to do any more or less than anyone else," he said.
Be the first to comment on this article!