Earlier this week, we awarded Dayton University the honor of the best St. Patty's College Party in the country, well-deserved after a rather impressive inbox flood. Well, they weren't necessarily lying.
Via Dayton Daily News:
University of Dayton Police along with Dayton police calmed a large disturbance involving more than one thousand students and other people in the 400 block of Kiefaber Street.
University of Dayton Police were dispatched sometime between 4 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. in response to a false fire alarm, said Teri Rizvi, a university spokeswoman.
Just before 5 a.m. police from around the Miami Valley region responded to the student housing area equipped with riot gear.
According to our crews on the scene, students were jumping on top of cars, throwing glass beer bottles into the street and yelling at police officers. Kiefaber Street is littered with broken glass, beer cans and trash.University of Dayton President Daniel Curran went to the campus after receiving reports related to the disturbance. The university released a statement on Sunday afternoon that Curran was “encouraging students to go back to their houses.” He was struck by a shield from a police officer. Public safety officers quickly escorted him from the scene, according to the university.
“He (Curran) was called by a vice president in charge of public safety and went over there to get a sense of what was going on,” Rizvi said.
Students were seen being pushed with police riot gear shields and resisting officer’s efforts to calm the crowd. There are no reports of injuries.
I'm sure this was a nightmare for anyone trying to protect the common welfare of citizens and such, but a first-hand perspective from a Dayton student indicates that at least from first reaction, enforcement way overstepped their bounds on this:
We spoke with one UD senior, Brandon Baeslack, who says he and several friends were walking with several cases of unopened beer about 6a.m. when an officer grabbed their beer and yelled at them to leave the area. He never made it to Kiefaber Street.
Baeslack said he felt police were acting inappropriately.
“They were fired up from what was happening, but that doesn’t give them the right to act like that,” said Baeslack. “St. Patrick’s Day every year is one of the best events of the school.”
He says people were just out on their lawns like they are every year. He says friends told him police were on their porches on Kiefaber Street, not allowing them to leave their homes.
“It’s never been like this, it’s the first year it has gotten out of hand. I love this school with all my heart, and it breaks my heart to see stuff like this especially when police are supposed to be protecting the students and not instigating,” said Baeslack.
You can read the full story here, complete with ridiculous video to get a sense of what went down in the late hours of the night/early hours of the morning. Definitely highly unfortunate when shit gets out of way hand like this, for both sides.
[H/T: Reader Email, S/G via Dayton Daily video]
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