Students allege police mishandled ethnic harassment complaint

Two University students were ethnically harassed by drunk Drexel University students early yesterday morning. And the students claim University and Philadelphia police mishandled the situation. At 2 a.m. yesterday, four Drexel students and another man made an unusually loud drunken exit from Cavanaugh's restaurant. When a Hamilton Court resident, awakened by the noise, asked them to be quiet, they began slinging racial epithets at him. Hamilton Court residents College senior Bela Shah and Wharton senior Monika Parikh, who had also been sleeping, woke up when they heard a racial slur containing the words "Indian" and "7-11," and looked out the window. They also asked the Drexel students to lower their voices. But instead of complying, the Drexel students proceeded to harangue them with more racial epithets for about 15 minutes, until University police arrived on the scene in response to approximately eight phone calls complaining about the noise. Shah said four University Police officers along with one Philadelphia police officer questioned individuals at the scene. Next, she said, two of the police officers tried to dismiss the case altogether, but the one African-American University Police officer, Rudy Palmer, insisted on pursuing the suspects. Shah said University Police took two Drexel students named Gregory Rosenbaum and Victor Vencus into custody and drove them to the Philadelphia Police Southwest Detectives. Shah and Parikh were also escorted to the station to answer questions. Once at the police station, however, Shah said she was not interviewed by any detectives. She said she heard a discussion in the next room in which one person was urging another to release the students. Parikh said that Palmer had informed her that the father of one of the suspects is an area police officer. "I heard them in the other room saying, 'Those guys are college kids, they don't need a permanent record,' " Parikh said. At around 6 a.m. the students were released, with no charges pressed. The victims were told that for the suspects to be charged with ethnic intimidation, a police officer must have been on the scene to witness it. According to Victim Support and Special Services Director Maureen Rush this explanation is inaccurate. "No, that is not true," she said. "Bad guys don't usually want to stand there for cops to be there for them to say these things." Rush said that in truth, for a charge of ethnic intimidation to be pressed, the victim must be verbally assaulted on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. There must also be a physical threat of some type -- which in this case would be the fact that the students could not escape the verbal assault because they were in their home. "They live there, they can't leave," she said. "They could have gotten out of that apartment, but they would have been fearful of that." Rush added that the University Police were trained about ethnic intimidation this summer. After Rush met with Shah and Parikh, she called Southwest Detectives. They then decided to reopen the case and are presently working with the District Attorney's Office to obtain warrants for the arrest of the two students detained, Rush said. Shah and Parikh said they think the police acted inappropriately. "It was absolutely ridiculous," Shah said. "As soon as we got in there we heard [the Philadelphia Police] for a half an hour rationalize why there was no case. A few of the Penn Police were wrong for letting [the Drexel students] go and putting the whole thing on [Palmer]." Parikh thought that the questionable manner in which the incident was handled rivaled the incident itself. "I don't know what was worse," Parikh said. "The slurs or the treatment afterward." Shah also said race was a factor in the way the police treated the incident. "Privileged treatment to the white students was attributable to race," she said. "The white cops letting them go, the detectives saying, '[the matter] is not racial.' Yesterday they didn't give us the time of day and I do attribute that to race." Associate Vice-Provost for University Life Barbara Cassel said she was sorry the incident happened. "I feel very bad that it happened and doubly bad for the students that they did not get appropriate response from the police," she said. University Police Commissioner John Kuprevich, however, said his officers "took appropriate actions based on the circumstances found there." The two students said they were thankful to Palmer, who was supportive throughout the entire incident. "Had he not been there, I think this whole thing would have been pushed under the rug," Shah said. "It's only because of our persistence that this got moved any further." The DA's office will decide tomorrow whether to issue warrants for the arrest of the suspects.