Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is canceling a new course focused on evaluating the efficacy of military-style counterinsurgency techniques to fight crime in Springfield, Massachusetts, after critics raised concerns about the ethical implications of that approach.
The decision was announced Monday afternoon in an email from Harvard SEAS Dean Frank J. Doyle.
"I want to assure members of the SEAS community that we are aware of, and take seriously, the concerns that some of you raised about the design and pedagogy of the proposed course," Doyle wrote.
"The SEAS course approval process under which new courses are vetted prior to being added to the course catalog is intended to ensure that our curriculum fully aligns with the School’s mission, vision, and values," Doyle added. "During the coming days, the SEAS leadership will undertake a review of our course approval policies and procedures to determine if there are opportunities to further strengthen that system."
The course in question was titled Data Fusion in Complex Systems: A Case Study. If it had been offered this semester, it would have focused on evaluating the use of a policing technique known as Counter-Criminal Continuum policing, or C3, to disrupt gang and drug activity Springfield.
A letter dated Jan. 24 and signed by a number of Harvard students and organizations raised numerous concerns about the course, including whether its research activities would have obligations not to harm human subjects, whether Springfield residents' privacy would be sufficiently protected, and whether "the computational nature of the initiative ... naturalize[s] policies and practices that have had disparate impacts on Black and Brown communities."
Kit Parker, the professor who had planned to offer the course, served in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, and has been researching the efficacy of counterinsurgency techniques used in Afghanistan and Iraq as applied in Springfield for nearly a decade.
"C3 policing is designed to build legitimacy of law enforcement, [through] partnering relationships with the local citizens, to achieve the goals of a safer community," Parker, the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, said in an email.
Harvard officials with the school of engineering have not responded to a request for comment.
The C3 technique was pioneered by Michael Cutone, a retired Massachusetts State Trooper and the founder of a private company, Trinity Project C3, that specializes in the approach.
In a June 2020 interview with GBH News' Boston Public Radio, Cutone, who also served in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, cited C3 policing as a potential model for police reform.
"The policing program I started has nothing to do with militarizing the police," Cutone said. "It's basically taking the best practices I learned from community engagement with my time with the Green Berets, then applying them in the civilian law-enforcement sector."
In that interview, Cutone also said that in the C3 framework, members of law enforcement take their cues from local residents.
“The folks that came up with the best ideas to help their community were the citizens, and the cops were able to help them implement it,” he said. “What a novel idea.”
Neither the use of C3 techniques in Springfield nor Parker's interest in the method are new. The Harvard SEAS website includes multiple articles on those topics, including 2012 stories from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Harvard Gazette, and Nature.
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