Police Records Bill Stalled

The Mass. State Senate will have to wait at least another month to change public records law for private universities, after Senate Minority Leader Brian P. Lees postponed voting on the issue for a second time.

The Senate was slated to vote yesterday on Senate Bill 1735, legislation that would force private universities and their police departments to release confidential incident reports, but Lees postponed the vote until March 15. Lees had also pushed the vote back on its first Senate go-round on Jan. 18.

The bill would reverse a recent Mass. Supreme Judicial Court ruling in a suit brought by The Crimson against Harvard. The Court ruled in January that the Harvard University Police Department and other university police forces are not bound by the same public records law as state and local police, and consequently do not have to release internal, crime-related documents.

Lees is one of two lawmakers who run Senate floor sessions, and the process by which bills are postponed is fairly informal, according to Lees’s legal counsel Daniel J. Connelly.

Any senator can ask to postpone a vote, but a different senator can object and demand a vote that day.

No senators, including the bill’s sponsor Jarrett T. Barrios ’90 and leading proponent Dianne Wilkerson, demanded a vote yesterday.

Lees chose to postpone the bill rather than table it, which would have been more severe.

“Procedurially, postponing it is the polite way of putting it off,” Connelly said. “You can motion to table the bill which means you don’t even like it.”

In January, Lees postponed the bill to give himself more time to study how the bill would affect private colleges in his First Hampden and Hampshire district, Connelly said, but he added that he did not believe that Lees opposes the bill.

Neither Connelly nor S. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security on Campus, Inc., a group that has been lobbying for the bill, could provide an alternative reason for Lees’s postponement.

“Thus far, what we’re hearing is that there’s no specific grievance,” Carter said.

Barrios could not be reached for comment yesterday and his press secretary, Colin B. Durrant, had not yet consulted with his staff and could not provide comment.

—Staff writer Benjamin L. Weintraub can be reached at bweintr@fas.harvard.edu.