(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – The Harvard University Police Department has been slammed by the school newspaper for arresting too many black offenders in 2022.
Newly released data from the department shows that 56% of those arrested last year by the Harvard University police were black – whereas black people make up 10.6% of the population of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 6.7% of Harvard students, and 6.8% of Harvard faculty and staff,
Against that backdrop, The Harvard Crimson newspaper argued the arrest rate was “disproportionate to the makeup of both Cambridge and Harvard’s populations.” It accused the local law enforcement of “racial policing.”
“The proportion — 23 out of 41 arrests in 2022 — marks the highest rate in at least three years as the department has continued to arrest Black people disproportionately,” the Crimson wrote in a recent article, as cited by The College Fix.
The Fix quoted Heather Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow, as saying there was no evidence of racial discrimination by the Harvard Police.
“Policing today is data-driven; police go where crime is happening,” said Mac Donald, author of the book “The War on Cops.”
“Given the racial disparities in criminal offending, the police cannot police in a colorblind, constitutional fashion without having a disparate impact on blacks,” she added.
“The idea that the Harvard PD, one of the most left-wing agencies in the country, regularly subjected to diversity training, would be arbitrarily singling out blacks for arrest is ludicrous,” the scholar elaborated.
The accusations against the Harvard police come after an incident in April in which officers reacted to reports of an active shooter in a dorm.
“[Four black undergraduates] awoke to banging on their door and commands to ‘open up’ at approximately 4:15 am… Officers wielding assault rifles and wearing riot gear identified themselves and entered the suite before ordering the students out of their rooms at gunpoint,” the Crimson reported.
It was later established the “swatting raid” was caused by a hoax call, but on April 21, 45 black student groups issued an open letter declaring black students “should not have to live in fear of the police force being used as a weapon against them.”
