HUPD White: Harvard Campus Police Accused of Racial Profiling
Like the rest of us, I used to sleep easy knowing that while racism pervades American society, it has never been a factor in the affairs of Ivy League universities. But then Harvard had to go ruin it for everyone. Last week, Harvard President Drew Faust announced the establishment of a committee to review allegations of racial profiling leveled against the Harvard University Police Department. The department has been accused of "unfairly stopping African-Americans students, professors and other members of the community."
According to The Harvard Crimson, this review was formed in response to an incident where university police stopped a young African-American man using tools to remove a lock from a bicycle. After a conversation "laced with obscenities," the police learned the young man was the owner of the bike and a Boston area high school student working at Harvard for the summer.
Discussing the review, Faust writes:
The review will include consideration of HUPD's diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts, as well as the ways in which Harvard's past experience as well as best practices elsewhere can help inform our future practice.
After the jump, we'll look at some of Harvard's past experiences.
In May 2007, Harvard students called the university police to break up a "Field Day" being attended by several black student organizations. The police asked the students to provide identification proving them Harvard students and not a large group of trespassers.
S. Allen Counter, director of the Harvard Foundation and a Harvard Medical School professor, wrote about the incident in a Crimson editorial. He wrote:
These students felt collectively 'profiled' by race and asked the simple question, 'if fifty or more white students were engaged in similar activities would they have been approached by the police?'
Why do field days always end this way?
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September 4th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
…asked the simple question, ‘if fifty or more white students were engaged in similar activities would they have been approached by the police?’
The correct question to ask, of course, would be “If fifty or more white students were observed engaged in similar activities, would there be the same probability of them being engaged in criminal behavior?”
It is possible that the police reaction is an overreaction – maybe large groups of mostly black people regularly gather there, and crime rates there are low. But we should not expect exact equality in police treatment when different populations have different levels of criminality.
September 4th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Just gonna go out there and say it:
It’s Boston. What do you expect?
September 7th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
“reason” – wow. change your name to “reason-why-an-education-is-needed”