Columbia University has refused to turn over security videotape that could help identify who hung a noose on a black professor's office door, police said Thursday. Investigators began asking on Wednesday for tapes from cameras in the building, but have been rebuffed by administrators, said Paul Browne, the New York Police Department's top spokesman. He said police will have to get a court order to force the school to provide video they believe could crack the case. "It's unfortunate because it adds a time-consuming step to the investigation," Browne said.
A Columbia spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.
Authorities were testing the 4-foot-long twine noose for DNA evidence, but had no suspects as of Thursday morning.
On Wednesday, the professor who was the target of the attack, Madonna Constantine, told hundreds of faculty and students at a rally on the Ivy League campus that the incident was a "blatant act of racism" that "reeks of cowardice and fear."
"I'm upset that our community has been exposed to such an unbelievably vile incident," she said.
Police believe the noose was placed on the doorknob of Constantine's office at Teachers College — Columbia's graduate school of education — Tuesday morning, when a colleague spotted it and notified authorities. Police declined to discuss possible motives or suspects.
Constantine, 44, told police there was "ill will" between her and another professor who had replaced her while she was on an extended leave, a police official said.
But the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation had not been completed, stressed that the dispute was only one possible lead, and that police were also looking into whether "disgruntled students, anyone upset with grades" were involved.
The state Attorney General's office also sent lawyers from its civil rights bureau and investigators to look into the incident, said spokesman Jeffrey Lerner.
Constantine, a professor of psychology and education, has written about race, including a book entitled "Addressing Racism: Facilitating Cultural Competence in Mental Health and Educational Settings."
Nooses — reviled as symbols of lynchings in the Old South — have showed up in several recent incidents around the country. Last year in Jena, La., three white students hung nooses from an oak tree outside the high school, inflaming racial tensions. Nooses also have turned up in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag, in a Long Island, N.Y., police station locker room, and on a Maryland college campus.
Teachers College held a community meeting Wednesday to discuss the incident, which comes on the heels of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's inflammatory visit to the school and the recent discovery of racist graffiti in the bathroom of a campus building. Teachers College, founded in 1887, describes itself as the nation's oldest and largest graduate school of education. According to the university's Web site, the college brought black teachers from the South to New York for teacher training in the early part of the 20th century, when schools in the South were segregated.