In April and May, student protesters at Johns Hopkins University engaged in a civil protest against the establishment of a police department on their campus. As the university moved towards rolling out the police force, they quashed the students’ protest with the help of the Baltimore Police Department. While Johns Hopkins may have won the battle against the student protestors, the students’ activism has opened the door for other students around the country to attempt to preempt the establishment of police forces at their own universities. The students’ activism has also opened the door for other students to demand that their universities justify the maintenance of police forces where such forces have already been established, as is the case at Harvard University, where I attended law school for the past three years. Through that door I go.
Today, it is perhaps more important than ever before to demand that universities justify their police forces. The campus-cop industry booms, and, according to a 2015 study published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 68 percent of American universities with at least 2,500 students employ police officers with the power to arrest, and 75 percent of the same employ armed police officers.
While the BJS study found that public universities were more likely to employ police officers than were private universities, it is even more pressing to demand that private universities with police forces justify having those police forces for reasons that should become clear shortly. An appropriate justification would involve a university with a police force demonstrating an actual and legitimate need for such a police force that is compelling enough to overcome the issues discussed below. Where private university police forces are not so justified, they should be disbanded. In the alternative, where unjustified university police departments are not disbanded, they should be relieved of their power to arrest, search, seize and do violence. That is to say, without the requisite justification, campus police departments should either be disbanded or, alternatively, they should be disarmed and disempowered.
Harvard University has not justified its police force, and until it does, the force should be either disbanded or disempowered.
Officers of the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), operating under the imprimatur of a private university, enjoy broad public powers, including the power to arrest, search, seize and do violence. This clash of the public and the private was brought to a head in the 2006 case Harvard Crimson, Inc. v. President And Fellows of Harvard College, which was decided by the highest judicial authority in the Commonwealth, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC). The case began with a complaint filed in a Massachusetts state court in 2003 by the Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper. The complaint named Harvard University, the HUPD and Harvard’s Chief of Police, Francis Riley, as defendants. The newspaper sought to obtain HUPD records that it claimed were public records within the meaning of, and therefore subject to disclosure under, Massachusetts state law.
In the Harvard Crimson case, the SJC pointed out that “[s]ome officers of the HUPD have been appointed special State police officers pursuant to G.L. c. 22C, § 63, and some HUPD officers are deputy sheriffs in Middlesex and Suffolk counties,” deputized pursuant to another Massachusetts state law. This distinction comes with much difference.
HUPD officers deputized in Middlesex and Suffolk counties, where the cities of Cambridge and Boston are located, respectively, have the power to arrest in more than one jurisdiction — an incredible power that even the public, local police may not normally exercise. In fact, the deputized Harvard Police are authorized to exercise public power on Harvard’s campuses, located in Cambridge and Boston, and in all 52 towns and cities located across the two aforementioned counties, according to the complaint filed by the Harvard Crimson.
