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Victor A. Clay’s tenure as chief of the Harvard University Police Department was meant to be a new chapter for the embattled department.

The University’s longtime police chief, Francis D. “Bud” Riley, had retired in 2020 amid reports of widespread racism, sexism, and favoritism within HUPD. Outcry from students snowballed. An external review, commissioned by Harvard leadership, recommended deep, structural changes to the notoriously rigid department. And Clay, brought on from the California Institute of Technology, was meant to correct the course.

“At a moment of national reckoning about the relationship between police departments and the communities that they serve and protect, we are thrilled to welcome a leader who understands the challenges and opportunities of reimagining public safety,” then-University President Lawrence S. Bacow and Executive Vice President Katie Lapp wrote in an email announcing Clay’s appointment to lead the force.

Clay quickly restructured HUPD’s senior leadership and committed to bringing transparency to a department that had long been at odds with its student body. While HUPD continued to draw criticism from student protesters and activists, Clay’s department also saw successes — instituting structural reforms and peacefully monitoring last spring’s encampment without arrests.

But when Clay quietly cleaned out his office on May 8 — leaving his position with no explanation — the chapter came to an abrupt and unceremonious end.

For many inside the department, Clay’s sudden resignation did not come as a surprise. Behind closed doors, HUPD was racked by an exodus of officers, legal threats, allegations of a toxic workplace, and labor disputes. In lawsuits and legal threats reviewed by The Crimson, officers allege Clay engaged in unfair hiring practices and unprofessional communication with his subordinates while refusing to meet with officers.

By early April, the union representing Harvard’s patrol officers held a virtually unprecedented vote of no confidence in the chief. Nearly every officer present voted against him.

Interviews with three current and former officers, alongside hundreds of pages of emails, text messages, court documents, and unredacted legal filings obtained by The Crimson, detail a fractured police department that Clay struggled to lead.

“Since July 2021, my goals were to support and improve the department, to address the longstanding concerns of the community we serve, and to ultimately keep the campus and its diverse community safe. I believe that we have begun that journey and have made significant strides toward those goals. But I also knew that the change process would be difficult,” Clay wrote in an email announcing his immediate resignation.

“I believe it is in the best interest to give new leadership an opportunity to continue moving the department forward,” he wrote. Clay did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.

Hours later, Harvard Executive Vice President Meredith L. Weenick ’90 thanked Clay for his service in an email to HUPD staff. A University spokesperson declined to comment on the department’s internal turmoil.

Now, as Harvard embarks on yet another search for a chief capable of leading its tumultuous police force, its next leader will be tasked with resolving the tensions that proliferated under Clay.

A New Era For HUPD

Clay was handed a department plagued by public distrust and allegations of police brutality and racism, tasked with increasing student trust. As he worked to institutionalize reforms from the 2020 external review — as well as implementing his own, variably successful initiatives — the chief appeared to make progress where his predecessors fell short.

HUPD drew backlash — and some of the earliest calls for its abolition — over several incidents of alleged racial profiling under Chief Paul E. Johnson in the early 1990s. In 1992, nine years into Johnson’s tenure, the Harvard Black Students Association detailed four police stops it alleged were racially motivated in a flyer titled “On the Harvard Plantation.”

More than two decades later, policing across the country came under scrutiny during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 — and HUPD was no exception.

Student groups like the Harvard Alliance Against Campus Cops began to call for the department’s abolition, pointing to disproportionate arrests of Black individuals logged in HUPD’s online workload and crime dashboard.

Clay repeatedly engaged with anti-police protesters, moving to close a HUPD substation in Mather House after students and faculty raised concern about police presence in an undergraduate dormitory. And as pro-Palestine protesters regularly criticized the department’s surveillance, Clay defended students’ right to protest during last spring’s encampment in Harvard Yard.

Despite Clay’s efforts to engage productively with HUPD’s critics, lapses in emergency communications consistently challenged the department’s credibility.

HUPD was met with widespread outcry over the handling of a 2023 swatting incident in Leverett House, where four Black undergraduates were held at gunpoint by Harvard police after a false 911 call sent armed officers dressed in riot gear into an undergraduate suite.

Clay had proposed a plan for unarmed responders just a year prior to the swatting incident, but negotiations over its implementation stalled and the proposal never bore fruit.

The department saw another, more recent disconnect after a 30-minute delay in notifying students of shots fired in Harvard Square. With limited details conveyed in untimely email notices, fear and distrust reverberated across the student body.

HUPD spokesperson Steven G. Catalano, who is responsible for sending emergency notifications to the student body, declined a request for comment on the April incident.

Still, Clay’s promises for transparency and accountability held promise, with a majority of Harvard undergraduates reporting they trusted the department throughout his tenure in The Crimson’s senior survey.

But tensions within HUPD flared behind closed doors, as officers left a department which was marred by allegations of toxicity and ineffective leadership.

‘It’s a Mass Exodus’

Within months of arriving at HUPD, Clay restructured much of the department’s leadership: demoting several of Riley’s top officers and bringing in new faces to help helm the University’s police.

But his hiring decisions — which three officers allege elevated younger, less experienced officers to senior positions to the chagrin of longer-serving staff — depleted morale and opened the department to legal scrutiny.

Robert P. Harrington, a 75-year-old former HUPD lieutenant, sued the department in March for allegedly passing him over for a promotion to captain based on his age in 2022. He alleged that the department instead favored “four younger, less qualified, less experienced candidates” — John F. Fulkerson, Ryan J. Stanton, Amy Divirgilio Fanikos, and Jacobo “Jake” Negron.

In the months leading up to Clay’s reorganization, Harrington claimed the chief refused to meet with him. Though Clay originally touted an open-door policy, officers allege this was one of many times where Clay cut out communication with his staff.

“On August 17, 2021, Chief Clay, after confirming and scheduling with Lieutenant Harrington a meeting with all of the staff of the Criminal Investigative Unit, cancelled the meeting and never rescheduled it,” the lawsuit reads. “At this time Lieutenant Harrington began to notice and experience negative treatment from Chief Clay.”

According to Harrington’s lawsuit, Clay refused to meet with him to discuss day-to-day logistics, as well as interpersonal matters on multiple occasions.

“This was a stark contrast to what occurred in the ordinary course of business under former Chief Riley,” lawyers for Harrington wrote in a court filing.

Three officers interviewed by The Crimson said that, by the end of his tenure, Clay rarely showed face in the office.

A former officer, who served in the department for more than five years, said he left the department after increasing frustrations with Clay’s leadership. He said that Clay did not grant him an exit interview prior to his departure.

“There are a lot of good officers that were there for the right reasons. And it’s a mass exodus right now,” the officer, who was granted anonymity over fears of professional retaliation, said.

More than a dozen officers have left HUPD since 2021, some citing Clay’s disengaged leadership as the driving force behind their departures.

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Martin E. Fay, a former sergeant who retired from HUPD in 2023 after nearly two decades, similarly said Clay was rarely accessible, but that his views of the chief were largely neutral.

“I didn’t have any real feelings about him — against him or for him,” Fay said. “He wasn’t around very much.

Concerns over Clay’s leadership came to a head in April, when the Harvard University Police Association — the union representing HUPD’s patrol officers — voted “no confidence” in Clay.

In response to a question asking if Clay has “been an effective leader of the Police Department,” all 35 officers voted no. 34 officers also voted that Clay has not “managed the Department in an open, ethical and fair manner” or “shown respect and appreciation for the work performed” by the HUPA’s members.

On the same vote, 31 officers also responded that Clay has not “fairly and appropriately handled the promotional process and/or specialty assignments” for union members, according to an announcement by the HUPA’s executive board that was shared with department leadership and obtained by The Crimson.

“None of the responders believed that the current chief has been an effective leader, or that he could effectively lead the Department in either the short or long term,” the HUPA’s board wrote.

Disputes, Complaints, and Legal Threats

Even before officers issued their vote of no confidence in Clay, the department was already dealing with lawsuit threats and a host of complaints filed with the Peace Officers Standard and Training Committee — a state regulatory body that oversees police.

The POST Commission, formed in 2020, is a board tasked with regulating the certification, training, and disciplinary records for all officers in the state. Department chiefs or administrators, as well as members of the public, can submit complaints against individual officers. The complaints are then recorded in a state database without naming the complainant.

According to publicly available data from the POST Commission, there have been eight sustained complaints against four separate HUPD officers since 2021 — meaning that the commission found there was sufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations. After the complaints were filed, officers received written or verbal warnings for their misconduct.

Fulkerson is the subject of three of these complaints, two of which claim that he “maliciously targeted” Harrington in a March 2023 roll call meeting. A third POST Commission complaint was filed against Fulkerson in June 2023, alleging that he “failed to effectively manage personnel investigating the sexual assault” and did not “respond to an incident according to standard procedure.”

That complaint refers to an alleged dispute between Fulkerson and former detective Kelsey L. Whelihan regarding Fulkerson’s handling of a sexual assault investigation involving a Harvard undergraduate and a non-Harvard student.

Fulkerson said that the POST Commission complaints were “inaccurate and fraudulent” in a Friday statement. While the complaints are now closed, Fulkerson received verbal and written warnings over the allegations.

Whelihan did not respond to a request for comment.

Eventually, investigators with the Ed Davis Company — a private security firm headquartered in Boston — drafted a report on the handling of the assault at Harvard’s request, according to Domenic Paolini, Fulkerson’s lawyer.

But a November 2024 complaint with the National Labor Relations Board filed by the HUPA claims that Harvard has “failed and refused to furnish the Union” with the report since the end of October. The unredacted complaint, obtained by The Crimson, accused Harvard of “failing and refusing to bargain collectively and in good faith” by withholding the report from the investigation.

The University denied the HUPA’s allegations in their mid-April answer to the NLRB complaint. The unredacted answer, obtained by The Crimson, claimed that the investigation was not related to HUPA’s collective bargaining abilities. The complaint will advance to a September hearing in front of an NLRB panel.

Representatives for the Ed Davis Company did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A University spokesperson declined to comment on the NLRB filing.

The situation escalated beyond the POST complaint and NLRB filing — eventually pushing Fulkerson to threaten a lawsuit of his own.

Paolini sent a letter on behalf of Fulkerson to Clay, Whelihan, and four other HUPD and Harvard officials threatening to sue them on November 18, just two weeks after the NLRB complaint was filed. While a lawsuit has not been filed, a copy of the letter obtained by The Crimson includes allegations that Clay fostered a toxic workplace environment.

Two officers confirmed that the letter, which contains more than 150 pages of text messages allegedly sent between Clay and Fulkerson over the course of seven months, was widely circulated throughout the department.

Texts from a user labeled as Clay aired frustrations with individual department staff and HUPD at large in Fulkerson’s letter.

“I was sent here to fix this clown show. I am not to be blamed for the idiocy and dumbfuckery that goes on here. This is you and Denis and Jake and everyone else,” Clay allegedly wrote to Fulkerson in March, referring to the current interim HUPD chief Denis G. Downing and former captain Jacobo Negron. Neither responded to a request for comment on the message.

“If you were here before August 2021 this is your fault. Not mine. Circus Clown,” the message continued.

The text messages later turned personal as the user labeled as Clay called Fulkerson a “wise guy” and “Proud Boy” in March messages.

Clay did not respond to a request for comment on these messages.

Fulkerson has not yet filed suit due to Clay and Whelihan’s resignation — but still intends to file, according to Paolini.

“Clay’s resignation most likely will affect the facts and claims of Fulkerson's complaint. If suit had already been filed, the complaint would have had to been amended many times to include new facts and new claims,” Paolini wrote in a Monday statement.

Paolini noted that Fulkerson also intends to file suit against Harvard, which was not named in the original letter. A University spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the threatened lawsuit.

Fulkerson has since upped his legal team, bringing on three attorneys from Nesenoff & Miltenberg.

The New York-based Title IX firm previously represented a Harvard Business School professor accused of data fraud in her suit against the University, as well currently represents a Harvard’s former women’s ice hockey coach who was accused of fostering a toxic environment among players and is now suing Harvard for discrimination.

With the threat of a lawsuit hanging over his head, Clay leaves behind a department in disarray — a reality that HUPD’s new interim chief, Downing, must confront.

Downing steps into a role that he knows well. After Riley left the department in 2020, Downing assumed the position of interim chief during the University’s extensive eight-month search for a new chief. His main task: implementing the recommendations from Bacow’s external review.

Though the University has stayed silent on its plans to embark on another search, Downing will once again have to lead a fractured department — rebuilding trust and morale across the ranks.

—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.

—Staff writer Laurel M. Shugart can be reached at laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com. Follow them on X @laurelmshugart.