Yale police not getting to the bottom of a black student’s ID card.
Yale University is refusing to let the public see how its cops dealt with a white graduate student who called in a complaint about a napping African-American graduate student — and to see whether cops treated the two students differently.
Ronnell Higgins, the university’s police chief, this week denied a request by the New Haven Independent to release body camera footage of an officer questioning the white graduate student who made the complaint, Sarah Braasch.
The Independent has filed an appeal of Yale’s denial with the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission seeking to have the video released.
The African-American student, Lolade Siyonbola, made her own recording of how police questioned her on a separate floor. She posted it on Facebook Live. As of Tuesday afternoon, over 1.5 million people have watched that video.
The incident in question began at 1:40 a.m. on May 8, when Braasch awoke Siyonbola from her nap in a common room of the Hall of Graduate Studies. Siyonbola (who lives on another floor, which doesn’t have a common room) had been taking a break from working on a paper. Braasch informed Siyonbola that she didn’t belong in the common room and that she had a right to call the cops on her, which she did. (Siyonbola also captured that first encounter on a Facebook Live video. Both videos appear in the body of this story.)
The police responded. Siyonbola took them down to her room, opened the door, and then waited as they grilled her over whether she was indeed a student. They spent 15 minutes questioning her. The video went viral; national media, including The New York Times, CNN, and ABC News, covered the story, which generated debate over how police and universities deal with students of color.
One of the reasons for the delay: Two separate cops mistakenly thought that a date on Siyonbola’s ID card was an expiration date. In fact, it was a date of issuance. “It’s expired!” one officer told her. “Do you have any idea what’s going on with your Yale ID?” asked another?
Upstairs, a separate officer questioned Braasch. No video has been made public of that encounter.
One of the questions that have emerged involves whether police treated the two students differently. A university spokeswoman told the Independent (in this article) that the officer questioning Braasch did not have trouble confirming her student ID status — and that she did not use the “method” of questioning the expiration or issuance date. It took the police 11 minutes to question Braasch, then returned for another seven minutes, during which time they “admonished” her that she shouldn’t have called them to complain about Siyonbola, according to an official university account.
The university spokeswoman, Eileen O’Connor, said “the officers didn’t do anything wrong.” She said the university will remind all its officers that the dates on student IDs represent the cards’ issuance, and that students have the right to use “preferred” versions of their first names on the cards (another reason for the delay in confirming the legitimacy of Siyonbola’s card).
The Independent filed a request Saturday under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to review the body cam video of the police questioning of Braasch to research the question of whether or not Yale cops treated a white student and a black student differently. Police departments have begun equipping their officers with body cameras over the past few years with the stated purpose of addressing precisely these kinds of cases — allowing the public to see how the police do their jobs, and holding officers accountable, when the public has expressed concerns. The cases that prompted then-President Barack Obama and chiefs across the country to adopt the cameras all involved allegations of mistreatment of blacks and Latinos.
Chief Higgins responded to the request Monday evening by email. He wrote that “the Yale Police Department will not provide the requested information.”
He cited two reasons: shielding the students’ identities, and an exception under the law for “uncorroborated allegations.”
Privacy?
Marekshia Ricks Photo
Yale top cop Ronnell Higgins with Greater New Haven NAACP President Dori Duma at awards dinner last week.
“[T]he Yale Police Department has not released the identities of the students involved in this incident, and their safety and privacy are a matter of concern under both the FOIA (C.G.S. Sec. 1 – 210 (b)(3)(A)) and the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act,” Higgins wrote.
Yale might not have released the two students’ names — but millions of people have read their names in connection with this incident and watched them speak during it.
Siyonbola, of course, didn’t seek to have her name kept private. She immediately broadcast her encounters with Braasch and with the police on Facebook Live, and kept the videos there. She gave media interviews. She sought to have the incident publicized.
Media outlets from the Times to ABC to CNN to Time magazine to the Atlanta Voice, from the Associated Press to the Daily Mail to News Max to the Grio to The Root, from City Pages to the New Republic to BET to Slate — to name just a sampling — published pieces on the incident. Many named Braasch and embedded the videos.
A Google search for Siyonbola’s name turned up 307,000 results, the vast majority related to this incident. Braasch’s name produced 504,000 results, again mostly related to the incident — and to a prior incident in which she had called the university police to complain about the presence of a black Yale student in her dorm.
“Uncorroborated”?
Lolade Siyonbola, whose name Yale claims it’s trying to keep secret.
Higgins’ second stated reason for not releasing the body cam footage: “The information that you request was created in connection with an uncorroborated allegation of trespassing, and C.G.S. Sec. 1 – 210 (b)(3)(H) exempts from disclosure “uncorroborated allegations subject to destruction pursuant to section 1 – 216.”
“The exemption does exist,” confirmed Thomas A. Hennick, public information officer for the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission. “It is subject to interpretation.”
The exemption customarily has been held to apply to cases — such as domestic violence calls — where police conclude they cannot corroborate the facts of an alleged crime because of “wildly disparate” versions, Hennick said.
In this case, the university issued a public statement (reproduced in full at the bottom of this article) stating that it had in fact drawn and corroborated conclusions, that Siyonbola did not commit a crime. And university officials have stated that the police “admonished” Braasch for calling the police in this case. None of the university’s public statements have indicated a lack of corroboration of any facts in this case.
FOI Phobia
Yale’s police department — which has government-issued powers to detain and arrest not just students, but all members of the public, and which patrols New Haven’s downtown and Dixwell neighborhoods — has a history of resisting freedom of information law.
In 2007 Yale refused an FOIA request to release personnel files of officers who arrested a 16-year-old African American from New Haven who had been riding his bicycle on a sidewalk near campus. The rider’s lawyer — then-public defender Janet Perrotti, who happened to be the then-Yale police chief’s sister-in-law — filed the FOIA request; she believed the Yale cops had racially profiled her client.
Then-Yale Police Chief James Perrotti denied the request. Yale insisted that its police force is a “private entity” not subject to public disclosure law, in part because it receives no government funding.
Janet Perrotti appealed the case to the FOIC. The FOIC ruled in her favor. It decided that Yale’s police force — which is regulated by government, certified by the state, and gets government funding indirectly through tax exemptions — indeed must follow rules of public disclosure under the FOIA. (Read a full story about the case here.)
In the appeal now before the FOIC over the body camera footage of the dormitory napping-while-black case, the commission will be asked to rule on whether the rules legally apply in this case.
Meanwhile, Yale will face the broader question of whether the public has a right to know how the university’s cops do their jobs. And whether any circumstances exist under which Yale will allow the public access to video showing their cops did their jobs in controversial incidents of public concern.
Was this ugly incident all about a petty beef over who should have user "rights" to the 12th floor tower common room? (Braasch lives on the 12th floor?, Siyonbola definitely lives on the 5th.)
Pretty nasty to sic the cops on a fellow student with a bullshit trespassing charge. But there must be some greater back-story to this seeming on-going feud between the two.
All that being said, it was jaw-dropping to watch the Yale Police detain Siyonbola for fifteen minutes, when they should have let her go on about her business. No doubt in my mind that was racial bias.