On Sept. 8, 2002, Middletown police broke up an outdoor party on Pine Street using batons, pepperball guns, and a K-9 unit. Twelve students were arrested.

“They called them the ’Pine Street Riots,’ ” said Matt Lerner ’03. “I remember it being a rowdy night.”

With the release of the Fountain Report on Monday, the story of the 2002 “Pine Street Riots” is useful in examining the ups and downs of a campus trying to come to terms with a conflict that hits upon issues of class, social life, and the law. As alumni witnesses recalled the angry Wespeaks, forums, administrative responses, and the 2002 night itself, the question is begged: Why did this happen again?

According to Nonie Hamilton ’03, the party started to go down hill when a fire alarm was set off.

“I was at a house party turned into a street party, and the fire alarm went off,” she said. “Rather than slowly escalating, there was a huge fire department response. The [police] immediately showed up and started arresting kids, throwing them on the ground and in the back of cop cars.”

Vice President of Student Affairs Mike Whaley, who was dean of students in 2002, explained the order of events.

“The police were called by the fire department, [the fire department] was having trouble getting through the crowd,” Whaley said. “Like on Fountain [in 2008], the police had to forcibly clear the crowd.”

Once the police arrived, the conflict only escalated, said Lerner, who was a Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) official.

“I remember we came onto a scene,” Lerner said. “There were police cars. Everything turned into a lot of chaos. Everyone was running in different directions. People yelling. Confusion. People didn’t know what was happening at the time. I was pretty upset.”

Similarly to the 2008 Fountain Avenue incident, students attempted to contact University officials as the conflict unfolded. In 2002, however, Hamilton said, efforts were not as successful. President Roth arrived at the scene during last semester’s incident.

“I had a dean’s home phone number,” Hamilton said. “But I don’t think she completely believed us. They didn’t send anyone down.”

As with last Spring, a forum was held the next day to discuss what had happened, though there were many more University and local officials in attendance. Along with members of the Middletown police and fire departments, several WSA members—Hamilton and Joey Wender ’03 among them—spoke. At the forum for the 2008 incident, WSA President Mike Pernick ’10 spoke, but the only adult official present was Whaley.

Wender, president of the WSA for the 2002-2003 academic year, felt that the forum was beneficial.

“Generally, it prompted some good, healthy dialogue,” he said. “Nothing like it happened again. It stayed in the background. Chalking became a big issue not much later and held the interest of the campus.”

Not all students agreed with Wender, however. In a Wespeak published on Friday, Sept. 13, 2002, David Weiner ’06 expressed unhappiness with the result of the forum.

“We blew our opportunity on Tuesday night to get real answers and opinions about what happened the night of Saturday the 7th,” Wiener wrote. “ [Deputy Police Chief Phillip] Pessina came to campus, determined to give vague, unhelpful answers. He stalled, he did not directly answer a single pertinent question, circumvented and forgot to answer pieces of questions, and used the pending trials as a judicial shield.”

After police broke up the Fountain Avenue party this past May, students wondered whether the Middletown Police Department had a grudge against University students. Alumni who experienced the 2002 event had mixed views of whether animosity between police and students led to that event.

“I never experienced [animosity] before that night,” Hamilton said. “It seemed like there were tensions that I hadn’t really understood.”

Wender felt that minimal previous interaction between University students and Middletown police led to a serious miscommunication that ultimately caused the incident.

“I would call it a lack of respect,” Wender said. “[Police and students] rarely interacted with one another, and they rarely clashed. Students were used to PSafe. Police were used to Middletown residents.”

Similarly, Whaley does not believe that pre-existing town-gown divisions incited the 2002 conflict.

“Some students may think there is a sustained animosity, but I don’t think that’s the case,” he said. “When the police come to campus, they’re doing the job they have to do.”

Only three weeks after the “Pine Street Riots,” attention quickly shifted elsewhere as President Doug Bennet enacted a moratorium on chalking. The New York Times reported on the event and, in November, the faculty voted against the chalking moratorium. A cursory glance through The Argus archives for the rest of that semester shows little, if any, interest in the Sept. 8th conflict.

However, on October 25, 2002, it was announced that, in response to the Sept. 8 incident, Officer David Beauchemin had been selected as the liaison between the Middletown Police Department and the University. While there had been a liaison in 2001, the officer had retired and had not been replaced.

Meanwhile, Whaley, was charged with investigating potential Student Judiciary Board cases that surrounded the incident.

“What I was most concerned about was finding out what happened at the [2002] incident, making sure students weren’t in violation of the non-academic code of conduct,” he said.

This time around, as a member of the Fountain Avenue Working Group, Whaley is again listening to student perspectives of the conflict. Thanks to a binder full of student eyewitness reports and video footage from Public Safety, Whaley believes that the University has a more clear-cut version of what happened in May 2008 than it did in 2002.

“We can make more specific recommendations about what should happen,” he said.

Whaley believes that, ultimately, the similarities between the two incidents will become evident in the Fountain report.

“When the final report comes out, some of the recommendations [will be] the same we recommended after [the 2002] incident,” he said.