A much smaller nightmare, unless you were there

Lisa Foderaro has the story in The New York Times:

It was well after midnight, and the invitation-only party for Yale University undergraduates was reaching a peak. In the upscale nightclub Elevate, not far from campus, more than one hundred students in semiformal attire were on the dance floor as Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing pulsed over the sound system. In a throwback to childhood, a buffet table held platters of chicken nuggets and French fries.

But then the lights came on and about a dozen police officers and state liquor control agents, acting on a tip about under-age drinking, entered the club early on Saturday. Partygoers say the officers, two of them in riot gear and armed with assault rifles, ordered students to sit on the floor as they checked IDs, and for the next hour silenced polite questions with expletives and threats of arrest.
Some students were crying even before an officer used a Taser gun on one sophomore; the police said the student had assaulted three officers. Another student said an officer had punched him.
Raids on bars are not unusual these days in New Haven, where huge crowds in a cluster of downtown nightspots have lately turned rowdy. But the sweep last weekend has reverberated far beyond Elevate, a second-floor club on Crown Street, angering students and perplexing administrators in the Gothic halls on campus.
Yale deans have urged students to write up accounts of the police action, and sent mental-health counselors to the two residences, Ezra Stiles College and Morse College, that organized the event. On Thursday, a group of students plans to walk to police headquarters with their formal complaints.
The New Haven Police Department, which has begun an internal investigation, declined to comment. But hours after the raid, it issued a news release vigorously defending what it called a “compliance inspection”, part of Operation Night Life, a crackdown on crowding and violence at bars and clubs in a three-block area where a shooting occurred last month.
The statement said police officers had been trying to “defuse the chaotic situation” in Elevate, which was 58 percent over its legal occupancy, an “egregious violation.” Four students were arrested, and one was cited for under-age drinking.
Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said in an interview that the presence of two officers in riot gear, members of the police SWAT team, was “excessive and inappropriate” and “should not have been part” of the inspection. “We undertook eighteen inspections over the past two weeks, and most went fine and accomplished our mission of enforcing under-age drinking,” Mr. DeStefano said. “Clearly, there were some things that could have been better handled, and this department needs to look at that.”
The raid on a private Yale party was a startling turn of events, given the generally positive relations between the Police Department and the university in recent years. While careful not to pounce on the police before the investigation is completed, administrators have still expressed their concern. The dean of Yale College, Mary Miller, met with the mayor, a group of Yale students, and other university officials to discuss the police raid.
In an interview, Dr. Miller said she had been to Elevate, a private event space inside the larger Alchemy nightclub, for previous parties. Calling it “capacious” and “quite spectacular,” she praised the club’s managers for their enforcement of drinking laws. “Of the various clubs where we organized off-campus events, it was the best one,” she said.
Jaya Wen, a junior who helped organize the weekend party, said two security guards were at each of three entrances to the bar area; students without wristbands could not enter. Ms. Wen said the owner had assured organizers that Elevate could comfortably hold 350 people. A lawyer for the club said that the capacity for both floors of the building was 650, and that partygoers had access to both levels.
In its news release, the New Haven police said that the capacity for the event was 150 and that there were 256 people at the Yale party. The release added that the department’s chief, Frank Limon, was especially sensitive to the dangers of overcrowding. “Chief Limon was the commanding officer on the scene of a nightclub tragedy in Chicago in 2003,” it said, adding, “Twenty-one people died and hundreds were injured when a panic set off a stampede in a club with the same type of difficult egress at Elevate.”
But some students said it was aggressive behavior by the police that created any risk. The officers and liquor control agents ordered students to put away cellphones, refused to answer questions ,and roughed up others, the students said.
“I’ve never felt any danger in New Haven before this event,” Ms. Wen said. “It was the police action that caused our feeling of being unsafe, of terror.”
Students disputed the department’s contention that the sophomore stunned with a Taser had attacked officers. “The student did absolutely nothing wrong,” said Tully McLoughlin, a senior who was a few feet away.
Ben Schenkel, a junior from Allentown, Pennsylvania, said he was just leaving as the raid began. Within minutes, he said, an officer in riot gear pushed him and struck him on the chin. “He was cursing wildly, and I was completely tongue-tied,” said Mr. Schenkel, who still had a welt on his chin on Tuesday. “I made sure to throw in ‘sirs’, and was very deferential, but maybe he thought I was being facetious. He never gave his title, or the nature of the mission, or what I should do to cooperate.”