Last night, students at Wesleyan University in Connecticut celebrated the end of finals as students usually do --with a big party. But this time 10 or more police cars showed up to try to disperse the crowd.  The students didn't leave and what ensued involved pepper spray bullets, attack dogs, taser guns, and rubber bullets.  Five students were arrested. Some students had to be hospitalized.

The best coverage of this event is by Wesleying, a blog run by Wesleyan students.  It includes links to all the media coverage (both print and television), student testimonials, photo documentation of the events, and more.

Full disclosure, I graduated from Wesleyan last year and have first-hand experience with some of the tactics the police use to break-up parties.  There is certainly enough blame to go around. Students definitely become stubborn and don't want to give into authority.  Some are disrespectful (and outright dangerous) to law enforcement officers and have an unjust sense of entitlement. Others have been racially targeted by police officers and attacked unfairly by overzealous cops with pepper spray, dogs, and taser guns.  The police often seem intent on confrontation. I'm not sure why it was necessary to call in the police when the students were not bothering anyone prior to the arrival of the police officers. (The party in question was on a side street with houses only occupied by students).

Many questions come out of this incident that fit into a larger context:

A police car remains flipped over and destroyed behind the Evergreen State College gym this morning. It is a silent reminder of an infamous Valentine's night. It is important that we try and make some sense of what happened and why. What made hundreds of students surrounding a cop car start chanting for the release of a black man in the back of the vehicle? What made the chanting and blockading become pepper-spray and broken bottles?

The majority won’t look very far for the answers to these questions. Most administrators, faculty, staff, students, media and police will take certain stances that are predictable and simple. Their reactions will be based in stereotypes. Unless we reject these answers as insufficient, valuable understanding will be lost.

A better understanding of why students sat covering their swollen eyes unable to breath and cops were forced into retreating away from a myriad of thrown projectiles can be discovered in a historical context. Olympia passed a law that effectively banishes the homeless from downtown. Police downtown increase their arrests and harassment for frivolous crimes like jay walking. Evergreeners were maliciously brutalized at the Port of Olympia protests by cops earlier this winter. All these are local issues that make this campus upset.

On a larger level students are fed up with a war in Iraq led by a president they hate. This causes a legitimate sense of powerlessness over their government. Issues like global warming and a rapidly recessing economy portend towards hopelessness about their future. These, along with mounting school loans, are common worries of college students everywhere in America. Here at Evergreen these troubles have started to lead towards action.