Racial Profiling? Harvard Reviews Campus Cops

Aug. 28, 2008 — -- Campus police at Harvard University are under scrutiny, as the Ivy League school this week launched a review of the department amid allegations of possible racial profiling of students and professors.

In a letter released to the public and addressed to colleagues, university president Drew Gilpin Faust announced plans to review the department's diversity training in light of an incident earlier this month as well as "concerns expressed internally."

"The review will include consideration of HUPD's diversity training, community outreach and recruitment efforts, as well as the ways in which Harvard's past experience as well as best practices elsewhere can help inform our future practice," Faust said.

The statement referenced an incident that occurred earlier this month in which police confronted a person using tools to remove a lock from a locked bicycle.

"It was later established that the person was working on the Harvard campus for the summer, owned the bicycle and was trying to cut the lock because the key had broken off in that lock," Faust wrote.

According to the Boston Globe, that person was a young black man.

An unnamed source told the Harvard Crimson, "The conversation between the individual and the officers was laced with obscenities." That source told the paper that the officers have allegedly been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.

The university's review will be overseen by Ralph Martin, a former Suffolk County district attorney and currently the managing partner of the Boston office of the law firm Bingham McCutchen, with several professors on the board. The school also is separately investigating the specific bicycle incident.

A Harvard spokesman said he was unsure of how long the review would last.

This isn't the first time that campus police have had run-ins with black members of campus, according to Charles Ogletree, the director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School and a professor at the university for nearly 20 years.

"I don't recall a year at Harvard that I've not been approached by one or more students who expressed some concern with their interaction with the police department," Ogletree told ABCNews.com. "We've held sensitivity training sessions with the students and police that were extremely instructive and helpful."