COLUMN: I Want to Tell You

From Mike Nadel's "Give 'em Hell," Fall '95 From Mike Nadel's "Give 'em Hell," Fall '95It happened four years ago when we watched the video of the Los Angeles Police beating Rodney King with their nightsticks. It is happening now as we listen to Mark Furhman describe how he and his fellow officers trumped-up charges against the innocent and covered up for each other. Around the country people are debating whether these are unique cases or whether this kind of police misconduct is widespread and even typical. My story does not paint a pretty picture for the University of Pennsylvania Police Department. This past April the Spring Fling block party on the 3900 block of Sansom Street was bigger than ever. It spilled out onto 39th Street, and the estimates of how many people were there ran into the thousands. At about 1:30 a.m., a small army of police lined up in front of Cavanaugh's. Their nightsticks were drawn. It looked like a scene from another country. Just as they did at every major party that night, the police were going to shut the block party down. When the police began to move, I was on the Walnut Street side of the party with Dan Schorr, a 1995 College graduate and my predecessor in this space. Dan and I made our way up 39th Street towards the slowly advancing line of police. It was then that we saw Officer Mike Sylvester beating a student with his nightstick. Officer Sylvester was using both hands to repeatedly strike the student in the stomach, a method known to the police as "spearing." What the student had done to initially offend Sylvester is unknown, but when we saw him all he was doing was receiving the blows as Sylvester pounded them into him. I acted on instinct. I ran up to Sylvester and said, "I know you didn't just do what I think you did!" Sylvester turned his attention to me. As the student he was beating took off into the crowd, Sylvester pushed me. So I said, "I know you didn't just do that!" "Alright, you're coming with me," declared Officer Sylvester as he arrested me. His Napoleon complex in full swing, he grabbed me and handed me off to two other officers who slammed me up against a car, frisked me, and put me in the patty-wagon. Dan saw all this going on, and he came to my aid just as I had for the student who was enduring Sylvester's assault. The outcome was similar. Dan joined me in the paddy wagon. Sylvester told him he was being arrested for "being an asshole." So we sat in the wagon for forty-five minutes while the police cleared the scene. With us were two other criminals, foreign students from Drexel who had found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time as they tried to access their car on Chestnut Street. These two had no idea why they had been arrested, so they kept trying to communicate with the officers in the front of the van. Every time they knocked on the glass, two of UPPD's finest responded by making the volume of the Pearl Jam they were playing louder and louder until it became unbearable. Eventually we arrived at the police station in Superblock. Dan and I were taken out of the van and walked into the station. Then we were handcuffed to the wall, and we met Officer Chris Kennedy. Officer Kennedy had not been around as the incident at the party took place. He was unable to describe what we had done. But he didn't let that deter him. He charged us with disorderly conduct and listed himself on the citations as a witness. As the citation was being typed by a clerk, Officer Kennedy offered us some UPPD wisdom. "To me," he said, "Penn students are no different than homeless people." Clearly, he did not mean that University students should not receive special treatment. He meant that homeless people are not entitled to be treated with dignity, and neither are students. Dan was very upset, and rightly so. He started asking lots of questions about the charges and about his rights. This annoyed Officer Kennedy, so he instructed the clerk to add an additional charge to Dan's citation –– a charge which had absolutely no basis in fact. This Fuhrman-esque fraud was a critical mistake on Kennedy's part. It was five o'clock when we left the station. The night was over and our dealings with the University began. As is the case with most scandals, the more serious crime lies in the cover-up. The University administration was aware of what had happened to us by the next afternoon. Dan and I began a series of meetings and e-mail correspondence with John Kuprevich, the lame-duck police commissioner whose resignation had already been announced. Kuprevich investigated what had happened to us. Officer Kennedy changed his story several times over the course of the next few days, and as he did so Kuprevich transmitted Kennedy's shifting lies to us over e-mail. The highest levels of the University went on alert; a media disaster was in the works. Steve Schutt, President Rodin's chief of staff, realized it would be wise to make the whole thing go away before it went public. Dan and I were called in to meet with Schutt, Kuprevich, Police Chief George Clisby, and Executive Vice-President John Fry. We told our story yet again. Clisby just scowled silently. Kuprevich tried to defend his officers, but he was sadly embarrassed when we provided his superiors with his own e-mail showing that he was not quite telling the truth. All Dan and I wanted was to get the charges dropped. However, Officer Sylvester's beating of a student and Officer Kennedy's dishonesty were very disturbing for us. Not so for Schutt. The President's right-hand man simply wanted to keep the misconduct off the front page of the DP. "What's the bottom line?" he asked. I wanted him to clarify. "Do you mean, 'What do we want?'" I fired back. Schutt nodded. He was talking quid pro quo. Well, Dan and I were soft. We let them delay and delay until the DP stopped publishing for the semester. Then they told us we were on our own. In the end, the disorderly conduct charges were dismissed, no thanks to the University. However, the larger issue remains: What is the University going to do about its police department? What happened to us was not an isolated incident, and now the administration knows it. At University Council last May, President Rodin was told of nine separate examples of police misconduct during Spring Fling alone. Most of these involved undue physical force by UPPD officers upon students. There was a collective gasp in the room as the Council heard of an officer picking up a student by his throat and slamming him into a wall. And these were only the horrors we know about. It is likely there are many more which will never come to light. President Rodin seemed genuinely disturbed by what she heard. To date, though, nothing has been done about the police. Mike Sylvester's badge now reads "Field Training Officer." Chris Kennedy is still filling out citations. The Code of Silence lives on. Kuprevich could not handle the department, and so he's gone. Clisby was in on the cover-up, so little can be expected of him. In a few weeks, Tom Seamon will take over as police commissioner. My hope is that when Seamon comes on the job, he will have the strength of character to straighten out the department. A university police force cannot effectively protect the community unless it is trusted. UPPD has lost the trust of the community and needs to earn it back. Since all this happened to me last spring I have been struck by the extraordinary number of students who have come up to me and told me of similar experiences with the police. Yet none of them had ever come forward. Some just did not want to get involved. But some actually told me that they feared retaliation if they spoke up. That is how low the regard for UPPD has fallen. The silence must not go on forever. From this point forward, students must make themselves heard on police misconduct. Only then will things change. And fear not. The pen is mightier than the sword -- or the nightstick.