“I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.” And the pod bay doors closed… Clunk.
…and listening to the radio. Former Governor John Rowland (R-New-England-”lite-D”-type) has a talk show, and he was talking about the turrible events taking place at Central Connecticut State University, a hopped-up community college in New Britain. Seems a criminal had been seen (see left, a scary black criminal, although Rowland never said the b-word), and in Rowland’s view, the police very sensibly locked down the campus and flooded the zone with LENCO Bearcats and SWAT mall-ninjas, who ran around going “hut-hut-hut” and at least, unlike their brethren of Boston Marathon fame, didn’t have any reported negligent discgharges.
At 1600 the AUTHORITAHs had a press conference, and fortunately (or unfortunately, as it may be) the traffic was lousy enough that I was still within earshot of Rowland’s show. Most of the conference was taken up by the President of the College, some anonymous hack reaping his reward for toiling in the bureaucratic slave galleys. But when the conference was opened to questions, the press ignored the figurehead and zeroed in on the two police chiefs present: New Britain’s and CCSU’s campus cops’. And we quickly saw that something big was missing from this story of crime and punishment: a crime.
The cops tried to stonewall the press, but the reporters did that annoying reporter thing, asking the same questions over and over as if the questionee is stupid. And it became apparent that there’s a reason reporters do this: if you have people who are not high-handed and accustomed to shoving their way through a hostile media scrum, like these two small-time police chiefs, they will waver and tell you things that they didn’t want to say. The chiefs gave up the following facts with the greatest reluctance:
There was no criminal misconduct, just various snitches trying to ingratiate themselves.
The reason for the alarm? Someone (who turned out to be a student) was turned in to the New Britain PD for… wait for it…. wearing camouflage. He may also have had a sword. Asked if he had a handgun, one of the snitches said he had a backpack, which might have contained a handgun. (Hell, if you watch TV, it might have contained a nuke, too). No one actually saw a gun. The cops admitted this with great reluctance, but the reporters worried it out of them like a terrier gnawing on a rat.
The police locked down the school, cancelled classes, and ran around campus pointing guns at people for the rest of the day.
Students pointed to where the camo-clad menace went — into his dorm room in James Hall. Scores of police swarmed the hall, and arrested the menace, figuring they would figure out charges later, and two of his friends for being his friends.
They then cleared every one of 415 or so rooms in the eight-floor building.
Police admitted very reluctantly, 20+ minutes into the conference, that no weapons were found.
It was 30+ minutes before they admitted that there was no real threat (unless you count a bunch of quasi-trained mall ninjas running around with their fingers on triggers).
It was 40+ minutes in before they admitted that the “suspect” was cooperating, and that what he was wearing was a Halloween costume.
They said they were going to charge them, but they had run into a small problem of with what. But they were determined to think of something. (As you’ll see below, they did).
John Rowland thought this Stasi-type, informant-driven, zero-evidence dragnet was model police work. (Come in from the cold, Erich Honecker, all is forgiven). When a caller tried to say, “wait a minute, where’s the crime here?” Rowland testily cut him off and broke the connection. But he let people who shared his “let no whiff of liberty infringe on our atmosphere of pervasive, intrusive security” emote at great length. It was a “conversation” as political partisans like to have a “conversation” — all opinions from A to almost B!
Proving his brilliance by agreeing with us, Reason’s Ed Krajewski, er, “observes and reports”:
Central Connecticut State University declared a state of emergency and ordered a campus lockdown after reports of a possibly costumed armed man on campus also carrying what looked like a sword. “Somebody was seen either with a gun or was thought to have a gun,” a university spokesperson told the press. The lockdown ended after police took three people, including at least one student, the primary suspect, into custody. They recovered no weapons, and the Hartford Courant reports that the campus police chief said there was never a threat to anyone. Nevertheless, even while acknowledging the incident “possibly could have been a Halloween costume,” the campus police chief insisted it “wasn’t a prank because there was concern, there was alarm.”
via Central Connecticut State University Locked Down After Campus Shooter “Scare” That Could’ve Been a Halloween Costume; Campus Police Chief Says There Was No Real Threat to Anyone, Charges Likely – Hit & Run : Reason.com.
The Hartford Courant — which, like Rowland, thinks this was cutting-edge police work — continues to report on this story. Some of the facts they emphasize in their front-page report include:
Students were “alarmed”.
The kid with the costume… which he was still wearing from a weekend party … is charged with “breach of the peace.” (Wait, he didn’t go nuts, the cops did? Oh right, the law doesn’t apply to cops. So you gotta find somebody else). The law-challenged CCSU police chief, one Chris Cervoni, says charges are justified “because there was concern, there was alarm.” So that’s when the Constitution gets suspended.
The costume was supposed to be “Snake Eyes from the GI Joe movie.” Whoever that is. Turns out it’s a popular costume character for kids or adults, available in many versions from retailers like CostumeCraze and Target. (Costume… $32.95. Tuition… free cause Dd’s a professor, as you’ll see below… arrest record… Priceless!)
Note that it’s not even camouflaged. The snitch flunks Mall Cop 101, “observe and report.”
We’re not taking away what they’re taking away. Facts we also found in their article include:
The would-be informant who triggered the whole thing is a Marine vet, and — wait for it — a former
mall ninja
SWAT officer.
The suspect, Dave Kyem, is the son of a CCSU professor. The jokes write themselves.
Despite the small Coxey’s Army of cops, they caught Kyem when… his friends told him “I think somebody got your Halloween costume conduses with a gunman.” And so Kyem called up the cops and said, “Yo.” They arrested him and his two roommates (as of the press conference, the CCSU police chief was hoplessly confused about whether the roommates were CCSU students, but they were).
Kyem has been charged with “breach of the peace,” a misdemeanor. On Corvini’s theory that former-mall-cop angst equals behavior that shocks the conscience, apparently. We’ll see how that fares in court.
We note that CCSU is noted for bilge-low academic standards. It’s nonselective as to admissions (i.e., “fog a mirror”), and its most distinguished (?) professor is legendary academic fraud Michael Bellesiles. (In Bellesiles’s defense, look at the literacy level of these comments on his teaching, which also makes a point about CCSU. Pretty big fall for the guy who won the Bancroft Prize, albeit with a fabricated book. Note also that the CCSU student paper on Bellesiles, linked above, quotes Bellesiles saying “I wish I never written about guns,” which we will give the old phony credit for not having said that way. He’s a fraud, not a dolt; this is just one more data point on CCSU quality).
So it’s not really surprising to read this quote, from student Inassia Woods:
“I was really scared. I was really shaking but I just stayed calm,” Woods said.
You don’t say.
Connecticut? We don’t recommend it. But sometimes it’s between here and there.