The choice to exclude all non-criminal reports—rather than only those of sensitive incidents like this spring’s attempted suicides—was motivated by a desire for consistency, he said.

“We wanted to avoid the appearance of picking and choosing what we were going to report,” he said.

But Silverglate called the new format unprofessional.

A more thorough approach is “how real police report on a log,” he said.

“You would think that if they’re really professional they would act like real police officers.”

Recent police logs from private Massachusetts colleges and universities including MIT, Wellesley, Boston University and Amherst show that they follow standards similar to that which HUPD had used up until its most recent log. Those schools’ logs list records of non-criminal incidents ranging from reports of suspicious persons to car accidents.

The MIT log does open with a disclaimer notifying readers that medical transports and false alarms are omitted, but is still more comprehensive than the new HUPD version.

Undergraduate Council President Rohit Chopra ’04 said he was dismayed by this week’s slimmer-than-usual offering from HUPD.

“It seems like there’s something to hide,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like they’re putting the safety and peace of mind of the community first.”

He added that he was “surprised, because the police department generally has a very good reputation of openness and honesty.”

But Chopra worried that the decision signalled worse things to come.

“If this is an overall tendency to scale back information about crime to avoid public scrutiny, that’s a very bad thing,” he said.

—Rafe H. Kinsey, Heloisa Nogueira and Lara Pedrini contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.