At a corner table in the House of Blues last month, University General Counsel Anne Taylor and Harvard Police Chief Francis D. "Bud" Riley reflected on one of their hardest days at Harvard.

With Taylor's blessing, Riley had just fired all seven of his department's lieutenants--the middle managers who were the last obstacle to his overhaul of the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD).

"It's bittersweet," Taylor said of the firings. Each lieutenant had spent more than decade on the force. "I'm incredibly excited about the future."

But Taylor's optimism is not universal. As Riley's new approach to policing envisions a force of "tutors with guns," old ideas about policing are dying hard at 29 Garden St.

Older officers complain that "community policing" makes them more like security guards than real cops. Union contract talks have stalled, two lawsuits are pending against the department, and Riley has been criticized for communication problems.

And so, while campus crime declines and experts endorse Riley's approach, HUPD's internal turmoil may force Riley to remake the department in order to rule it.

Cops Without a Cause

HUPD--like the University that it protects and serves--has never been free of controversy. From the earliest days of the organized department, when Robert Tonis was chief in the late 1960s and early 1970s, black students had accused HUPD officers of racial discrimination. Complaints of police brutality were fairly common.

HUPD's beat was far more dangerous then than it is now, and accordingly the department was structured like a municipal police force.

Most of the force's 52 officers patrolled the campus on foot during this time. The command structure included 17 sergeants, two lieutenants and one captain below the chief.

One survey called HUPD a "reactive" force during the 1970s, essentially aimed at being in position to flood a crime scene with officers immediately after a crime was reported.

Foot chases were common. One senior lieutenant remembers once running all the way to Somerville to catch suspected robbers.

Minor changes took place in the late '70s, as HUPD took more officers off the beat and into patrol cars. But the department's focus remained reacting to serious crime.

In 1983, the University hired Paul E. Johnson as chief. He made a few structural changes but was known as "No Waves" because he avoided making decisions that would upset anyone.

Johnson was not popular. Union problems and accusations of wastefulness were compounded by accusations that Johnson, himself black, had allowed a climate of discrimination to grow within the force.