Harvard police update crime log data
By Emily Anthes
GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
The Harvard University Police Department changed its public crime log yesterday after a crime watch organization accused the department of violating federal law by withholding details about crime on campus.
All colleges and universities are required to maintain a public log that includes the time, date, and location of crimes reported on campus.…
Last week, Security on Campus, a national nonprofit group, threatened to tell federal Education Department officials that Harvard had failed to abide by the law for the past six years. Security on Campus said that in some cases Harvard failed to disclose relevant details of serious crimes reported on campus.…
“It’s important that campus communities have complete and accurate information about crime on their campus … so that they can make informed decisions about avoiding victimization,” said S. Daniel Carter, vice president of Security on Campus.…
Carter pointed to an entry that Harvard police made on July 6 that did not say when or where a reported sexual assault had occurred; it only stated at what time an officer was sent to interview a victim about a previous incident.…
“A major campus police department such as yours has had ample opportunity to come into compliance with this requirement and the various specifics of it,” Carter wrote to Harvard Police Chief Francis Riley July 15.… “We are very disturbed by the fact that the Harvard University campus community has apparently in many instances been denied access to the specific dates, times, and locations of criminal incidents for nearly 6 years.”
Riley responded on July 16, pledging to change the format of the log.…
The online log changed yesterday. In the morning, it did not include the details of the sexual assault that was listed in the July 6 log [Public Police Log, July 10, 2004, vers. of July 12, 2004]; by midafternoon it noted that the assault had occurred on July 5 in a Harvard dormitory [Public Police Log, July 10, 2004, vers. of July 19, 2004].…
The conflict dates back to the spring, when a local crime analysis group alerted Security on Campus that it had difficulty getting details about on-campus crime from Harvard. James Herms, co-founder of the Student-Alumni Committee on Institutional Security Policy, alerted Carter to the problem.…
The e-mail Carter sent on July 15 said that if Harvard did not improve its logs he would complain to the US Department of Education, which … could fine the university up to $27,500 for each flawed entry.…
Herms said he is still concerned Harvard may not be mentioning crimes reported to Cambridge police in the university log.
Stephen McCombe, a longtime campus security guard who retired from Harvard in fall 2003, said he knew of occasions when crimes near campus reported to Cambridge police were omitted from the university log.
—Boston Globe, July 20, 2004, at B3, http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/ 2004/07/20/harvard_police_update_crime_log_data/. © 2004 by Globe Newspaper Co.
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McCombe, the founder of Harvard’s independent guards union, whose testimony has repeatedly been found credible by the courts, discusses factors contributing to the university’s security problems in an interview with the Columbia Spectator (Feb. 24, 2004, at 1).
