Bob Herbert: Innoncence is no Defense (Harvard Cops and Black Students/Staff)

Last August the president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, set up a committee to respond to the concerns of black faculty members and students who were uneasy, and in some cases upset, about the treatment of blacks by the campus police.

The arrest last month of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. did not occur in a vacuum. While his encounter was not with the Harvard University Police Department (he was arrested by a member of the Cambridge force), it was the latest in a series of troubling incidents that have left law-abiding members of the Harvard community feeling as though they were unfairly targeted and humiliated because of their race.

The incident that ultimately led Ms. Faust to establish the committee concerned a black high school student who was working in a youth employment program at Harvard. The Harvard police, responding to a phone call, spotted the youngster attempting to remove a lock from a bicycle. He tried to explain that the bike was his and that his key had broken off in the lock.

One of the officers reportedly pulled a gun and pointed it at the teenager. The frightened youngster said he did not have any photo identification, but he showed the officers his library card. Traumatized, he started to cry at one point. When the boy’s story was eventually confirmed, he was allowed to leave with his bike.

In 2004, the campus police stopped S. Allen Counter, a distinguished professor of neuroscience at the Harvard Medical School as he was strolling across Harvard Yard. Professor Counter, who is black and had been at Harvard for 30 years when the incident occurred, was viewed by the police as a robbery suspect. They asked him if he belonged at Harvard.

He did not have his identification with him. In a particularly humiliating ritual, the officers went to University Hall and asked two students to confirm that the professor had an office there. They did.

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Nworah Ayogu, a senior who is studying neurobiology, told me about a well-known incident that occurred in 2007 when a number of black students were playing games like dodge ball and capture-the-flag on the Quad as part of an annual field-day-type celebration. White students called the Harvard police to investigate.

The police showed up on motorcycles and asked the black students for identification, even though the students were wearing all kinds of Harvard regalia — caps, crimson T-shirts with “Harvard” emblazoned in white, and so forth. Mr. Ayogu said the cops actually seemed to be embarrassed by the situation and were not confrontational.

“The whole thing made us feel like we didn’t belong,” he said. “What was most offensive was that our own classmates called the police on us.”