MA: Private universities fight releasing police reports to the public.

After an alleged rape at a Tufts University fraternity house was reported Halloween weekend, Tufts police e-mailed students within two days and posted fliers. The campus alert did not include details such as the fraternity's name, which police gave the student newspaper three weeks later.

Across the country, many universities like Tufts use an array of electronic tools to quickly inform students of public safety threats. Boston University police use Twitter, while Harvard and MIT post a crime blotter on their web sites. Others text students or send e-bulletins for serious threats such as assaults or armed robbery.

Yet for a college student in Massachusetts seeking to find out more about an on-campus crime -- or a neighbor who lives close to one of Boston's sprawling universities -- gaining access to campus police reports is a crap shoot. Walk down Columbus Avenue to the Northeastern police and you may be told to set up an appointment to review the daily log. Ditto at UMass Boston. And campus police often hand-pick which incident reports student journalists can view and release filtered details about serious crimes.

Each private college or university in the Bay State sets its own policy on providing crime reports to the public. And there's the rub, according to campus safety advocates. Whether you attend a public or private college, campus police at either are sworn in as special State Police officers. Publicly-funded universities like UMass are supposed to provide full disclosure of police reports in compliance with state public records law, and advocates want the privates to do the same.

An unwillingness to disclose crime reports is not limited to colleges in Boston. In 2008 the Student Press Law Center checked Framingham State College and Merrimack College in its survey of all 50 states. Framingham State officials took 14 days to provide a daily crime log and almost three weeks to turn over a redacted incident report. Merrimack College police provided a log in two days but after two weeks withheld an incident report, the center found.



Link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ken-brack/push-to-open-campus-polic_b_795694.html