As the recent bomb scare at Harvard shows, the campus police are ever ready to respond to emergency situations in a professional manner.

However, for many college towns, there is increasing concerns about their boundary of their reach, especially in high-crime areas.

…[A] proposed expansion of authority has stirred concerns in Washington, D.C., where residents say university police don’t have the same level of training or transparency requirements as the city police. Campus police officers in the city have arrest powers on campus but participate in a separate, shorter training academy. And because private colleges generally aren’t compelled by public records law to release the same information as public institutions and government agencies, some are concerned about a lack of accountability to the city and its residents.

“If one of their policemen acted inappropriately, there would be hardly any recourse. We’d have no information, no follow-up,” said Ken Durham, a longtime resident of Foggy Bottom, the neighborhood that encompasses George Washington University, part of a consortium of schools mulling broader authority for their police.

Added Marina Streznewski, president of the Foggy Bottom Association, “Expanding the police powers of a university police force without some kind of clear and transparent mechanism is a really bad idea.”

The discussion is part of a bigger debate among universities about what type of powers university police forces should have. It also comes as the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings and the Penn State child sex abuse case have focused public attention on campus crime and on universities’ obligation to report criminal acts under the federal Clery Act.

In recent weeks, authorities investigated reports of a possible gunman in separate incidents at Yale, the University of New Haven and American University in Washington, D.C. Also, four buildings at Harvard were evacuated after police received an email claiming explosives were inside. There were no injuries in any of the incidents. A person was arrested in connection with the University of New Haven scare and weapons were recovered, according to the school.

As colleges and universities consider how best to safeguard the community, several have recently weighed whether to arm their officers — a debate that inevitably resurfaces after cases like the shooting this month of a Texas college student by a campus police officer after a traffic stop.

It’s not uncommon for campus police to have mutual aid agreements governing their relationship with local law enforcement, laying out the geographic boundaries of their authority and the circumstances under which they can make off-campus arrests. But some universities are hiring additional officers to cover extra off-campus ground themselves. The primary purpose is to respond to complaints from or about off-campus students, but in many cases the officers hold the same law enforcement authority as municipal police and can arrest people, such as drunk drivers near campus, with no university affiliation..