There's nothing that sends a chill into the bones and gets a heart racing on a Friday night like the realization that a Hanover Po cruiser is creeping up behind your back. There's definitely no love lost between a large portion of Dartmouth students and the Hanover boys in blue.
In a sense, we are lucky that this negative reciprocal relationship exists. Living in an affluent small town in rural New Hampshire, it is a rare occasion when a Dartmouth student would need the police for protection from crime.
It is an even rarer occasion when the police would actually be able to provide it. However, the college and the town seem to strongly believe that we require protection from ourselves. And within the context of their laws and regulations, some of us do, from time to time, encounter what the police consider protection and what some consider an oppressive denial of our right to have a few drinks and stumble peaceably home.
The denial of the proverbial right to party is very much an American phenomenon bequeathed to us by our Puritan and tee-totaling national ancestors, comparable only to the legal mores of oppressive Islamic states, and it is very hard to fight against.
However, denying police the right to abuse and excess is also an American phenomenon and one of the main reasons for the independence of our nation.
Compared with the police of most other countries, it is harder for American cops to abuse and overreach their power; unfortunately, our protections from those who protect and serve us are still rather easily circumvented.
I believe that the Hanover police department routinely and consciously overreaches its authority within the context of our national ideals. As Hanover police captain Frank Moran alliterated to The Dartmouth a few weeks ago in reference to increased alcohol-related arrests due to New Hampshire's ludicrous internal possession law, "Sometimes some of our guys seem overzealous." Understatement of the summer, indeed.
There is an overwhelming police presence at major college party events like Green Key and Homecoming and an excessive presence during all other weekends as well " a presence that makes students feel that our fun is criminal and that our desire to have it is degenerate. This presence also generates abuse. The sterile and misleading officers' accounts in the weekly Police Blotter published in The D often do not reflect reality, at least not as I witnessed it this past weekend during the arrest of a friend.
During Homecoming, freshmen circling the bonfire are kept a safe distance away from it by a cordon of police and Safety and Security officers. During my freshman year, I observed a police officer pushing every freshman he could reach, even those that were obviously staying within the allotted limits. Several female freshmen that fell as a consequence of his force came close to being trampled. When I chastised him for his actions, I was unceremoniously tackled by an S&S officer and threatened with arrest by another police officer. When told he has no authority to do so, the officer responded with, "don't tell me what I can or cannot do."
In his defense, he did realize he couldn't do it. I encountered the officer again a year later during Homecoming '03, as he lay in wait for students to come out of Stinson's with beer in their hands. Upon noticing my rack of Buds, he demanded my ID, scrutinized it for a full minute, demanded my Dartmouth ID without any right to do so, scrutinized that, gave me a look like he still thought I was a criminal and told me to go on. To me these actions constitute harassment; to the Hanover police they constitute good police work.
Needless to say, most police officers are wonderful men and women. However, it is a fact proven by psychological experiments and daily reports of police abuse around the country that power over other people corrupts. The 'don't tell me what I can or cannot do' attitude is easy to assume when there is a gun and a pair of handcuffs on your belt and many cops do assume it to various degrees.
Luckily, the Hanover police don't have that much power over us and any egregious abuses thereof are likely to end tragically for the officer involved. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about police departments in other parts of our country, ones that are based in poor, underprivileged neighborhoods whose citizens have neither the knowledge nor the money to stand up to bad cops. After all, if I were an African immigrant in New York City instead of a Dartmouth student, I might have ended up with 41 holes in my chest instead of an annoyance at being harassed when I complied with the cop's request for ID and pulled out my wallet. And like the cops who murdered Amadou Diallo, the officer would almost surely walk free.
The increased persecution and prosecution of young people for crimes like drinking alcohol is a very dangerous phenomenon. A whole generation is raised with the conscious and sub-conscious awareness that excessive punishment will be brought down upon them for what they consider as totally harmless and excusable actions.
This situation breeds mistrust of government authority and a feeling that one's personal interests and desires contradict those of one's society. Frivolous actions such as the Hanover police's threat to prosecute online poker players in the spring unravel the social contract between citizens and government organs. When the social contract is thus eroded, social unrest is possible.
Ultimately, "overzealousness" within the police force is self-defeating. Whether it results in an underprivileged man assaulting an officer because his brother is being beaten by the police or in a college-educated intellectual sympathizing with the insurgent because he was harassed by cops for no good reason, the goal of a crime-free society that respects the law and those who enforce it is annihilated.
