E-Mail This Article to a Friend ABOVE THE LAW The battle to make campus-police reports public BY DEIRDRE FULTON

On July 7, a Harvard police officer "confiscated three glass pipes and a small amount of a green leafy substance" from "two people acting suspiciously" on Holyoke Place off Mount Auburn Street. In the first two weeks of July, the Boston University Police Department investigated incidents of theft, drug use, and drunk driving. Anyone — students, faculty, reporters, or community members — can find this information by viewing police logs on Web sites for BU (www.bu.edu/police), Harvard (www.hupd.harvard.edu), MIT (web.mit.edu/cp/www), and other universities, or by walking into campus-police departments.

But let’s say you saw an incident on the log — a burglary in your campus brownstone, for example — and wanted a more detailed description of the suspect or of what was stolen. Under current state laws — despite the fact the university-police officers are sworn state officials — private colleges are not obligated to release full incident reports, which contain comprehensive statements and descriptions. Public universities and municipal agencies, such as the Boston Police Department, are required to make such reports available.

Some private colleges release them anyway; Harvard doesn’t. Joe Wrinn, Harvard’s director of public affairs, cites privacy concerns within a "close community" as the reason, but adds: "Nobody’s hiding information."

Activists, and now politicians, think otherwise.

Within the last two weeks, State Representative Alice Wolf (D-Cambridge) and State Senator Jarrett Barrios (D-Cambridge) introduced the Massachusetts Campus Police Records Bill to their respective bodies. The bill would ensure that campus-police officers can’t claim they are exempt from crime-reporting rules just because they’re university employees, says Wolf. The Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security will vote on the bill shortly. (The ACLU has come out in favor of the bill, lest anyone raise questions about civil liberties.)

"Students need to have the same information about crime going on in their community that any other member of any of the community has," says S. Daniel Carter, senior vice-president of Security on Campus, Inc. The Pennsylvania-based organization was founded by Connie and Howard Clery, whose daughter Jeanne was murdered at Lehigh University 10 years ago. To support the bill, Security on Campus joined forces with the Student-Alumni Committee on Institutional Security Policy (STALCOMMPOL), a Cambridge-based nonprofit watchdog group that keeps track of campus law enforcement and crime statistics.

"They’re allowed to arrest us, or do search and seizure," points out MIT chemical-engineering student Marjan Rafat, 20, who joined STALCOMMPOL a few months ago. "With that power comes a responsibility to tell us what’s going on.... If we know where crimes are taking place, we can avoid them or try to get more security there. If we’re not aware of them, we can’t really protect ourselves."

To follow the bill’s progress, visit www.mass.gov/legis/184history/h03449.htm. A public hearing is scheduled for June 29 at 10 am.