Via Minding the Campus comes this Boston Globe editorial. A “respectable” 22 percent of the Harvard police force is minority, but “that is no guarantee of success when dealing with the concerns of minorities on or off campus.” So, there’s going to be an “independent police review committee.”

What are the concerns that brought on a whole committee? Here’s one:

A prominent black professor has been mistaken for a robbery suspect.

No, actually, he was stopped and questioned on the street because he fit the profile of a robbery suspect, and part of that profile was “well-dressed.” He could not produce identification, which quite naturally made the police even more suspicious. So, they asked some students about the professor’s identity, and when the students confirmed it, that was the end of it. I can find no evidence whatsoever of any misbehavior in this matter.

Here’s another:

Last month, two Harvard officers were placed on administrative leave after a confrontation with a black high school student who was working on campus.

Few details missing on this one too:

Faust cited an incident earlier this month when campus police confronted a person using tools to remove a lock from a bicycle. She said the person was a summer employee who owned the bike and was trying to cut the lock because the key had broken. The Boston Globe reported that the person, whom Faust did not identify, was a black high school student from Boston.

Who do they think they are, questioning people who are cutting locks off bikes? The racist nerve! I bet they were even wearing huge, reflective sunglasses like that dude in Cool Hand Luke.

Here are the only details I can find on the ensuing “confrontation”:

According to the HUPD police log, the individual was found to be the owner of the bicycle and an affiliate of the university after questioning by officers. The person has since been identified as a black high school student from the Boston area working at Harvard for the summer. Faust wrote that an investigation into the interaction between the officers and the student has been launched.One source with knowledge of the situation said that “the conversation between the individual and the officers was laced with obscenities” and that the officers have been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into how they handled the incident.

If the obscenities were coming from the officers, that’s a problem. But there’s already an investigation into that. Why another one? And since there’s no accusation that the “obscenities” were racial in nature, why the assumption that a cop only lost his temper with a cursing teenager because said teenager was black?

Look, if the Harvard police are unfairly targeting minorities, it should stop. But there’s simply no evidence that this is happening, and thus there’s no reason for an investigation. What we have here is one example of a professor looking like a criminal (and because criminals are disproportionately black, black students and faculty will tend to face this more, but that’s hardly the cops’ fault) and one example of an innocent kid doing something that looks so suspicious it’s almost comical.

If you can point to better examples than the ones cited in most stories about the committee, e-mail me at phibetacons[AT]nationalreview[DOT]com.