The Harvard Crimson’s current lawsuit against the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) may ultimately prove futile if a bill currently in front of the Massachusetts State Legislature is signed into law.

If passed, the act would allow individuals to obtain the same type of detailed crime information from police forces at private universities that is currently only provided by public university and city police departments.

Under the current law, special police departments, such as HUPD, do not release incident reports—in part to protect the privacy of victims within a small community.

These incident reports—which public police forces (like the Cambridge Police Department) are required to disclose—contain statements from victims, witnesses, police officers who reported to the scene, and other detailed information about a given crime.

Currently, the information available to the public from HUPD includes the few-sentence incident summaries published daily in the online police log, in addition to the community advisory warnings sent to all students via e-mail after incidents of violent crimes.

But some members of police watchdog groups don’t want to risk the possibility hat The Crimson’s lawsuit and its attempt to gain access to these reports won’t survive its appeal. Instead, they are pushing for increased access to crime information themselves, foregoing the courtroom drama for parliamentary procedure.

“In our experience, the legislature is more expedient than the courts to get access to this information,” says S. Daniel Carter, a Senior Vice President for Security on Campus, a non-profit group that aims to improve security on college campuses.

STALCOMM-POLITICKING

Ironically, the impetus for the legislation came from a statement that Middlesex Superior Court Justice Nancy Staffier issued in her March 2004 dismissal of The Crimson’s lawsuit.

While she did not rule in favor of The Crimson, she said that the issue at hand would be “a matter best left for the legislature to consider.”

Carter, who is based in Tennessee, teamed up with James “Jake” Herms, one of HUPD’s most virulent critics, to conceive such a law.

Herms is the founder of the local watchdog group Student-Alumni Committee on Institutional Security Policy (StalCommPol). The organization, which is not affiliated with Harvard, made headlines in March of 2004 when it released a study that said Harvard students are more likely to be victims of violent crime than students at other comparable institutions.

However, the group’s study faced scrutiny from HUPD for using misleading methods of data analysis.

Herms’ work has been made more difficult because of a trespass order filed against him in the fall of 2003 after he allegedly made inappropriate comments to students.