Yale oversteps its jurisdiction

Meanwhile, in far-off New Haven
    By Ben Smith

Offer a cop a $20 bill, and you'll face bribery charges. But if you're a powerful old institution like Yale, you can get away with giving police officers whole salaries, not to mention health insurance, pension plans, and disability benefits, all included in this week's contract.

Most private institutions make do with uniformed guards, but Yale has had its own cops for over a century. The Yale Police, however, remained what one veteran officer described as "glorified security guards" until Feb. 17, 1991, when a mugger shot junior Christian Prince dead on the steps of St. Mary's Church on Hillhouse Avenue. The University soon invested more than $5 million in campus safety, nearly doubled the number of police, and, in 1996, created a group of gray-jacketed "security officers" to rattle doorknobs and replace lost keys.

Today, roughly 80 Yale officers have the resources to behave like real police—despite a lack of a public interest to legitimate their police power. One of the clearest results has been the transformation of the streets around campus into Yale territory. University officers can use their civil powers to chase beggars off public sidewalks and crack down on dangerous offenses like vending flowers without a permit.

I asked University Police Chief James Perotti how police choose between serving the public interest and serving Yale, their private employer. The Chief, a 25-year veteran of the force, admitted that impartiality is "a difficult area, and one that police officers recognize as difficult." He listed the benefits of serving on the Yale police force: formal training, state certification, the power to patrol the public streets that criss-cross campus, and the right to make arrests.

Police officers I talked to didn't see any problem with the setup either. Officer Keith Pullen thought about it after dismounting from one of the department Harley Davidsons. "Our job is to keep the campus area safe," he said, "and personally, I've never faced a situation when I felt I wasn't being fair." But he admitted that New Haven residents don't always see it that way. "People sometimes don't understand that we're real police; they say, `You're just Yale police.'"

Some New Haven residents, however, do understand that Yale's officers wear real badges. The perception that Yale has co-opted a civic function doesn't help the relations between the University and segments of the city's African-American community. "There's a common sentiment that the Yale police don't have to be accountable to the community and that they don't have to deal with the community," Emma Jones, head of Malik, the police monitoring organization named for her slain son, said.

Jones told me she hasn't recieved any major complaints about the Yale Police force: no brutality, no serious abuses of power. But, she says, she has heard a number of more minor concerns—"the typical harassment: following people around, people being stopped, pulled over, searched." While she said that her group's primary concern is the brutality and racism of some New Haven cops, the motives of Yale Police worry her. "After all," she said, "they're not employed by the city; they're employed by Yale."

The Yale Police work with New Haven cops on a daily basis, but there's no illusion that they're part of the same organization. A Yale officer told me that a few New Haven cops pay little respect to the University police—drive by without waving, ignore them in the street—and a New Haven officer noted, "They have fewer responsibilities than we do." But the division between the forces poses a more important practical problem than the occasional personal tension: Yale Police participate only partially in New Haven's community policing programs, which are aimed at reducing the friction between cops and locals.

The practical problems follow from the basic injustice of the situation: not only does Yale pay its own private army, but its soldiers dress as public servants. If police officers are to patrol Yale, they should be real police—they should get their checks from the city and serve the city. If Yale wants its own private security force, it should be made up of officers who have the same powers and limitations as ordinary citizens. Connecticut lawmakers late last century had no right to share their authority with a powerful private institution, and Yale has no right to keep it.

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