Editorial: A chance to come together

Pitt witnessed mayhem on its streets Thursday night.

Demonstrators — most of whom were from out of town — and police — most of whom were from out of town — faced off for hours, using our campus as a battleground.

In the end, more than 10 businesses and other University properties were vandalized. Forty two people were arrested.

Friday night was a different atmosphere, but no less chaotic.

Trying to avoid a repeat of the night before, police deployed about 400 officers into Oakland. While there were no repeats of vandalism and fewer protesters in Oakland, 110 people were arrested, mostly for failure to disperse and disorderly conduct.

Robert Hill, Pitt’s vice chancellor of Public Affairs, said the University will send arrested and cited students to its Judicial Board, which is composed of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as other Pitt staff and faculty members.

Like it did after February’s Super Bowl riot, the board has the authority to suspend or expel students who violated Pitt’s Student Code of Conduct.

But Friday night was very different from both the Super Bowl riot and Thursday night’s demonstrations.

Many people found themselves surrounded by police forces Friday, hearing orders to disperse but having no idea where they can disperse to.

Someone studying in the Cathedral of Learning could, at one point Friday night, walk outside and find themselves behind police lines. Other students on the Towers patio, even if they were stepping out of their dorm room for a cigarette, were gassed and arrested. Others found themselves walking home from work or a friend’s house, blocks away from Schenley Plaza, but nonetheless in an area police deemed an “unlawful assembly.”

It’s certainly possible that some students were instigating violence — and the law will rightfully punish them for it — but many of the students arrested for failure to disperse weren’t arrested because they were standing up to police forces. Some just happened to be within an area, encompassing much of Central Oakland, that police didn’t want anybody to be in.

It’s too early to say that police were either right or wrong in their strategy — after all, there was a string of vandalism here the night before — but one thing is clear: The situation was unfair to students.

Pitt sent out an Emergency Notification Service alert advising students to stay near their residences, but it did not say that students would be arrested if they went outside. To be fair, there’s no way Pitt could have known, but that just shows how unsuspecting the Pitt community was of the intensity of Friday’s police action.

Pitt students, the neighborhood of Oakland and the University itself were all victims of Thursday’s conflict, and Friday’s heightened police actions were a result of that conflict. While it’s too early to know exactly how many of Friday’s arrests were students, many students likely encountered police force without knowing that they were part of the “unlawful assembly” that apparently encompassed more than few blocks, an area where thousands of students live.

What we do know is that Friday night was ridden by confusion and ambiguity. It is unreasonable to hold students to the standards of prescience to not find themselves behind erratic and fast-moving police lines and the ability to decipher the uncoordinated and contradictory orders of an aggregate police force.

As a result, The Pitt News calls for universal amnesty from Pitt’s Judicial Board for all students arrested in Oakland on Friday night. It is absolutely impossible for the Judicial Board to differentiate between students arrested for failure to disperse because they were defying authorities and those arrested for failure to disperse because they were walking home.

The Pitt community has been the victim of enough disruption at the hands of an ideological conflict that is not theirs. It would only be out of disregard and cold indifference to subject the community to further unrest.