Wesleyan Incident Sparked by Student Ignorance

There are few things that get me boiled to the point of screaming uncontrollably. One of them is the absent minded ignorance of partying college students.

Early Friday morning, a group of about 250 students from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT felt the need to spill their incoherent and drunken blunders into the public streets.

As a result, Wesleyan Public Safety called Middletown Police for help in dispersing the crowd. When the PD showed up and asked the highly intoxicated crowd to move along, they were met with a barrage of flying bottles and rocks from a few of the more intoxicated revelers.

That's when police took the riot approach by breaking out pepper spray, pepper balls and K-9's to aid and protect them in dissolving the volatile situation.

Wesleyan students responded with an outcry of misinformed rhetoric on the Internet and in local television interviews, denouncing the police response.

Middletown Police, however, tell a different story.

They say the use of force was warranted for their protection... and the protection of the students themselves.

After listening to the frantic chatter of police on their scanners, I heard the out-of-control drunken bursts of the crowd myself before police took action. Like it or not, officers responded with the appropriate action.

Students, in their drunken stupor, acted totally out of control and brought force upon themselves. Intoxicated college students are like hyper 5-year-old children. The only way to get through to them in that state is to respond with physical coercion.

But of course, students, in their own world of inexperience, don't see it that way. They view it as police brutality and excessive force.

Nevermind the fact that no one was injured, and five students had to be arrested for confronting officers.

College students seem to like the idea of creating riot-like havoc so they can criticize the authorities for responding too harshly. We saw it on the UMass-Amherst campus after the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, when students felt the need to flip over cars and light them on fire.

It's amazing how students can be educated on facts needed to excel careers, but not how to apply common sense.

It's also amazing how in this post 9-11, post Virginia Tech and post Northern Illinois world, students like to push the envelope.

We can teach them to be lawyers, doctors and business owners; but we can't teach them the common sense of what needs to be done for public safety.

Maybe that is the solution. A general education class that focuses on how not to provoke a forced police presence. Obviously it's a skill that has to be taught along side reading, writing and arithmetic.

It's simple. If you're drunk, you're loud and you're with 250 of your loud, drunk friends in the middle of a public street, you deserve whatever's coming to you. Is it really that hard to think before you hurl that glass bottle?