SJC rules in favor of Harvard

Harvard University's student newspaper has no right to see written incident reports kept by the campus police because the Massachusetts public records law does not cover private institutions, the state's highest court ruled yesterday.

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Judicial Court rejected claims by the Harvard Crimson that the status of some univerity police officers as specially designated State Police or deputy sheriffs in Suffolk and Middlesex counties means that the public records law applied to the force.

''The public records law and its implementing regulations are applicable to documents held by public entities, not private ones," Justice Francis X. Spina wrote on behalf of the court. ''Simply put, Harvard University is a private institution, a fact not challenged by the Crimson."

The public already has access to many state-mandated records kept by Harvard police, including a daily log of incidents and arrests, and a monthly listing of all felonies on campus, the court added.

The Crimson's president, Lauren A. E. Schuker, 21, a senior, expressed disappointment in the ruling, which upheld a lower court's decision in 2004 to dismiss the lawsuit. She said the records currently available only give a glimpse of crime on Harvard property and that only the incident reports provide the full picture.

''We continue to believe that the Harvard University police should be subject to public disclosure laws," she said. ''Not having these records is essentially impairing our ability to report on the Harvard campus because we're essentially dependent on the police force to give us information."

Harvard's administration applauded the ruling. The university had argued that release of incident reports would violate the privacy of students and might disclose confidential medical information about those who call for help.

''The opinion upholds the university's decision to protect our students' privacy while at the same time recognizes that when the Harvard University Police Department makes arrests, records are available to the public," said Harvard's vice president and general counsel, Robert W. Iuliano.

Harvard police make about 100 arrests a year. Those records typically are available at arraignments, say university officials.

The debate over how much campus crime information should be made public goes back at least 20 years. In the 1980s, student journalists at Boston University were arrested after they refused to leave police headquarters without viewing the crime log. In 1991, Massachusetts became the first state to pass a law requiring campuses to open their logs to the public, a year after Congress mandated college crime reporting and public crime logs on campuses.

Harvard students first took their complaints to Secretary of State William Galvin in 2001, but his acting supervisor of public records said Harvard was not a public entity and need not release the reports. Middlesex Superior Court Nancy Saffier Holtz agreed two years ago when she dismissed the Crimson's lawsuit, which had sued for access to 10 specific police records. The incidents included several occasions when Harvard police helped Boston and Cambridge authorities, including a vandalism incident and the investigation of a missing person. The students asked the city police departments for the same records and the agencies complied.

Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, which represented the Crimson, said the paper wanted records of incidents that did not necessarily result in arrests partly to assess whether campus police engage in racial profiling.

''There are a lot of concerns that are not addressed by this decision, and I think the court is minimizing the real power that even college and university police officers have," said Wunsch, who stressed that the students did not want records that could compromise investigations.

Yesterday's ruling apparently ends the legal battle, but the Crimson is considering taking its fight to Beacon Hill. Bills introduced at the newspaper's request two years ago would broaden the public records law to apply to special State Police officers at higher education institutions and hospitals, according to a spokesman for Senator Jarrett T. Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat and sponsor of one of the measures.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.