This is the second in a series of bi-weekly columns designed to explain The Crimson's policy decisions and coverage choices.

While stories of faculty politics and administrative infighting have dominated The Crimson’s front pages, few articles published in the last two months have been as newsworthy—or as controversial—as our account of a drug arrest in Quincy House on Feb. 24.

Campus police searched a Quincy House dorm and arrested a 20-year-old sophomore for marijuana and LSD possession. The department released the sophomore’s name in an e-mail to a reporter, and that name appeared on the cover of The Crimson—along with a police officer’s account of the incident and interviews with some of the arrested student’s acquaintances.

Not everyone was pleased with the comprehensiveness of our coverage. Some readers complained about The Crimson’s policy of printing the names of students charged with drug crimes. While we take these complaints seriously, we ultimately believe that The Crimson has an obligation to provide our readers with thorough reports of campus drug arrests. That requires us to name names.

We recognize that our policy may carry serious ramifications for Harvard students who are arrested on drug charges. As one reader told us in an e-mail: “the stories that you have published are online and free information for anyone competent to run google searches. This means that for your 2 minutes of glory as journalists and editors, students at Harvard have a hugely compromised professional life.” The reader added that “absolutely no good can come from publishing the students’ names.”

Presumably a potential employer would run a basic background search that would turn up Middlesex District Court records from the Quincy House student’s case. The student’s name is also online—and available for free—in the logs posted on the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) website. So even if the Feb. 24 arrest does “hugely compromise” the student’s future, we’re not sure whether that comes as a result of The Crimson’s decision. But we believe that good can come from publishing students’ names in drug cases.

Some of the most vociferous objections to The Crimson’s policy of naming names have come from members of our own staff. After a January article identified four undergraduates facing marijuana charges, one editor wrote in an e-mail: “I think this example raises a fundamental point of how we should see ourselves within the Harvard Community. We are not the New York Times. We are a school newspaper…I worry desperately if we prize abstract ideals over the realities of our community.”

But in our community, the reality is that The Crimson’s position vis-à-vis the University Police is similar to the New York Times’ stance vis-à-vis local and state law enforcement agencies. Some members of the HUPD force are special officers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Some members of the force are deputy sheriffs of Middlesex and Suffolk counties. The Crimson took Harvard to court in our effort to gain access to HUPD records because we believe that members of this community should monitor the campus police force vigilantly—just as off-campus law enforcement agencies face strict public scrutiny from non-student, for-profit publications.

This is especially important for drug cases. The number of people arrested on drug charges at Harvard is no doubt just a tiny fraction of the total number of Harvard community members who have used illegal substances. So how do University Police decide whom they should arrest? While we have no evidence that recent campus drug arrests follow any sort of pattern, you don’t have to take my word for it: our reports allow you to track the University Police yourself. That would be impossible if you didn’t know the identities of students charged with drug crimes.

Does that mean that a name is necessary? Couldn’t readers adequately monitor arrest patterns if we had just said, for instance, that campus police charged a white male 20-year-old sophomore economics concentrator from Orem, Utah who lives in a fourth-floor Old Quincy dorm? Well, yes—provided that there were no key details that we omitted. Might it be relevant that, as a recent op-ed in The Crimson noted, the Quincy student was involved in the Harvard College Libertarian Forum, a group whose members have advocated the decriminalization of drugs? In my view, it seems unlikely that the University Police’s anti-drug efforts are targeting students with a particular political viewpoint. But you shouldn’t have to rely on your college newspaper editor to reach that conclusion for you. You should be able to review the list of recent arrestees and decide for yourself.

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, our readers should be able to hold us accountable. You should be able to sift through court records and assess the accuracy of our articles. And other newsgathering organizations should be able to verify—or second-guess—our reporting. Indeed, after the LSD arrest, the weekly Harvard Independent chose to follow up on our coverage—and to include more background information about the Quincy sophomore than The Crimson had initially provided. In order to thoroughly double-check our facts—in order to search court records or to interview the student’s acquaintances—it is necessary to know the student’s name.

The Crimson’s president, William C. Marra ’07, wrote in this space two Mondays ago that “journalism is all about trust.” And readers are more likely to trust our reporting when we include the names of our subjects. But that trust runs in two directions. When we print that Harvard officers have arrested an undergraduate on drug charges, we trust that you will take that report for what it’s worth: the University has leveled allegations against one of its own students, and those allegations have not been proven in court. It’s certainly not clear that the student is guilty of the crime for which he has been charged. And even if he is guilty, we know some readers believe that drug possession should never have been criminalized in the first place. As reporters, we pledge to seek all the facts. We pledge not to render premature verdicts. We know that you, as responsible readers, won’t either.

Too often, individuals are accused on the front page and exonerated on page 13. If the Quincy student is acquitted, we promise to run that news as prominently as we printed the initial charges. In the meantime, we continue to trust that readers will use our reports to monitor campus law-enforcement officials—not to rush to pass judgment on their peers. And we will continue to provide you with thorough accounts of this case’s progress through the courts.

Daniel J. Hemel ’07, a Social Studies concentrator in Lowell House, is managing editor of The Crimson. He can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.