Word: arresters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While stories of faculty politics and administrative infighting have dominated The Crimson’s front pages, few articles published in the last two months have been as newsworthy—or as controversial—as our account of a drug arrest in Quincy House...
...Middlesex District Court records from the Quincy House student’s case. The student’s name is also online—and available for free—in the logs posted on the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) website. So even if the Feb. 24 arrest does “hugely compromise” the student’s future, we’re not sure whether that comes as a result of The Crimson’s decision. But we believe that good can come from publishing students’ names in drug cases...
This is especially important for drug cases. The number of people arrested on drug charges at Harvard is no doubt just a tiny fraction of the total number of Harvard community members who have used illegal substances. So how do University Police decide whom they should arrest? While we have no evidence that recent campus drug arrests follow any sort of pattern, you don’t have to take my word for it: our reports allow you to track the University Police yourself. That would be impossible if you didn’t know the identities of students charged...
Does that mean that a name is necessary? Couldn’t readers adequately monitor arrest patterns if we had just said, for instance, that campus police charged a white male 20-year-old sophomore economics concentrator from Orem, Utah who lives in a fourth-floor Old Quincy dorm? Well, yes—provided that there were no key details that we omitted. Might it be relevant that, as a recent op-ed in The Crimson noted, the Quincy student was involved in the Harvard College Libertarian Forum, a group whose members have advocated the decriminalization of drugs...
...more importantly, our readers should be able to hold us accountable. You should be able to sift through court records and assess the accuracy of our articles. And other newsgathering organizations should be able to verify—or second-guess—our reporting. Indeed, after the LSD arrest, the weekly Harvard Independent chose to follow up on our coverage—and to include more background information about the Quincy sophomore than The Crimson had initially provided. In order to thoroughly double-check our facts—in order to search court records or to interview the student?...