A Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) officer, feeling threatened by a crowd of brawling students, sprayed partiers with pepper spray during Tropical Escape, an intercollegiate dance in the Dewick-Macphie Dining Hall on Saturday night.
The female officer, whose name was not released, ordered a crowd of individuals to stop fighting, but the crowd then began "moving towards her" and "crowding her," according to TUPD Capt. Mark Keith. In response, the officer "sprayed in the general area where the crowd was," Keith said.
The technique worked, as the crowd began to follow instructions and moved out of the building. But once the attendees were outside, further brawls broke out. Six TUPD officers had been on duty at the event, but reinforcements from the Somerville Police Department and TUPD arrived soon after the spraying. These forces were eventually able to calm the violence.
"No injuries were reported, no arrests were made and the event was closed down for the rest of the evening," Keith said.
But at least one Tufts student felt the effects of the spray. "There was one student who approached one of our officers feeling the ill effects of our pepper spray, but that person was tended to and the effects subsided within 10 to 15 minutes," Keith said.
Senior Simone Grant, the president of the Caribbean Club, which hosted the event, said that the pepper spray forced one girl at Tropical Escape to seek medical attention. "One girl had to call TEMS because she was coughing so much," Grant said.
Grant recalled the chaos of the situation when the TUPD officer dispensed her pepper spray. "All of a sudden, people started coughing. We had to evacuate because we couldn't stay in the building," Grant said.
Keith said that the officer only used pepper spray when she felt the situation had gotten out of her control. "[She] told the crowd to disperse, they again started crowding her, so she feared for her safety," he said.
Keith could only recall one prior occasion when a TUPD officer used pepper spray. In that instance, which Keith believed to have occurred a year and a half ago, a reckless driver was acting combative but the pepper spray successfully subdued him.
"It's an effective tool and it would be something that would be less harmful than resorting to a baton," Keith said. "The effects incapacitate a person … You can subdue them and get them restrained," he said.
The event ended at 1:30 a.m., which was one and half hours earlier than planned, according to Grant.
Grant did not know the individuals involved in the fight that triggered the spraying, but she said that they were not Tufts students.
She said that students from Harvard, Boston College, Wellesley and other Boston-area schools attended the event.
Grant said TUPD was not prepared for the event and had failed to set up a barricade in front of the dining hall to organize the entrance procedure.
"It was just a bunch of people fighting to get to the front. There was no order to get people into the party," she said.
She also said that the floor in Dewick had not been cleaned, which led to a 30-minute delay in starting the event.
"The Caribbean Club [executive] board had to clean the ground ourselves and … TUPD wasn't there to open the closet so that we could get a broom," Grant said.
According to Grant, the Caribbean Club sent in interdepartmental requisition forms (IDRs) to TUPD early, describing the nature of the event and the services they would require. "We sent in our IDRs and it's up to TUPD to provide the service we paid for… They did not prepare adequately for the event. We didn't get what we paid for," she said.
Grant is planning a meeting with the Office of Student Life and TUPD to discuss the events of Saturday night. She wants to discuss how to avoid similar mishaps in the future. "TUPD needs to be prepared," she said.
"It was the Caribbean Club's first big event of the year. We were trying to build up the Caribbean Club because last year we didn't have much of a presence, but it's kind of difficult to do that given what happened," she said.
Grant said that the event staff "did the best that they could with the resources they had" at the dance, which featured Boston-area DJ King Ilabash.
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Giovanni Russonello contributed reporting to this article.
