By Derek Hawkins and Marc Larocque

The recent surge in student arrests in Mission Hill and other off-campus communities has led some students to question whether or not they have the same rights as the permanent residents in their neighborhoods.

Peter Manning, a professor of criminal justice and an expert on crime analysis and policing, said off-campus students have the same rights as permanent residents. The only difference, he said, is that universities set conditions that bear on students’ behavior in a way the law does not.

Those conditions, however, do not infringe on students’ Constitutional rights, including freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

In recent years, Jeff Doggett, director of government relations and community affairs, has accompanied police on weekend patrols in neighborhoods with high student populations, like Mission Hill. Although he may arrive with police when they respond to a complaint on a student residence, Doggett and others in his position have no legal powers, Manning said.

“He has no more power in that situation than any other citizen,” Manning said. “If the police arrive at your door, you don’t have to let them in. But a lot of the time people just do. Unless they have a warrant, there’s no obligation to let them in.”

Exceptions may occur when police are responding to an obvious emergency or legitimate complaint. In those cases, Manning said, the law becomes less clear.

“If, for example, you have a huge stereo and it’s blasting and you refuse to let [police] in, they could say you’re interfering with a complaint,” he said. “Then you get into a gray area.”

The Good Neighbors Handbook, printed by Boston’s Rental Housing Resource Center, states that residents’ complaints, like noise complaints, about tenants within their own building should be directly channeled to landlords.

“If noise is coming from an apartment that is owned by the landlord, it is his responsibility to do something about it,” the handbook reads. “He might even have to evict the noisy tenant if a reasonable solution cannot be worked out.”

For neighbors of separate buildings, the handbook encourages residents with complaints to call the police.

During September, a group of permanent residents and local leaders of Northeastern’s neighboring communities have decried noise problems caused by students and called for increased patrolling on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. In some cases, however, landlords have been sought for intervention.

“There are some neighborhood groups that try to find the landlords,” said Mort Ahmadifar, senior hearing officer at the Rental Housing Resource Center. “They try to find absentee landlords. And when [the neighborhood groups] do that, they tell them obviously to try to rent to non-students or students who are not going to have loud parties and trash the place.”

The city government does not have an initiative to reach out to landlords whose tenants include college students, specifically, he said.

Many complaints were directed to police last month. Between Sept. 1 and Sept. 27, Mission Hill area police responded to 76 complaints of noise disturbance. In some cases, the noise complaints led to arrests for other reasons, like the keeping of a disorderly house, underage drinking, charging for alcohol in an unlicensed premises and drug activity.

The relationship between police, colleges and students has changed in the last three decades, Manning said. In the wake of large-scale and often contentious student protests in the late-1960s and early ’70s, local law enforcement began to give college police power beyond campus. Cities also began trying students with violations, on- and off- campus, in municipal courts.

“The law is penetrating more deeply into universities, which have traditionally been private corporations, protected from legal action,” Manning said. “What we’re seeing is the penetration of the law into more social relations and a more punitive approach toward the normal actions of the young.”

Students having the same rights as non-student residents means they’re also held to the same legal standards. The universities are no longer the sanctuaries they were in the past, especially for students who live off-campus.

-News correspondent Asha Cesar contributed to this report.