In two separate incidents over the past month, two Harvard undergraduates were arrested and charged with assault and battery on a Harvard University Police Department officer, among other charges, reports the Harvard Crimson.
The most recent incident occurred early on Sunday, Nov. 10, when Benjamin Y. Zhou '15 was arrested in the stairwell of Winthrop B entryway and charged with assault and battery on an officer, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. The other incident took place just before midnight on Saturday, Oct. 26, when Jack Z. Li '17 was arrested outside of Currier House during the annual Heaven and Hell Halloween party for the same three charges as well as the charge of assault with a dangerous weapon, according to their case dockets.
HUPD—which has “primary jurisdiction” over nearly all crimes occurring on Harvard’s campus, according to its website—rarely arrests Harvard students, according to the Crimson. Among the seven total arrests made by HUPD in the past 60 days, those of Zhou and Li were the only ones of Harvard students, according to HUPD’s unofficial public logs.
Keep in mind that cops have their own definition of "assaulting a police officer." If a cop is beating you in the face with his baton and you put your hands over your face to deflect the blows, that counts as an assault on your part. If a cop shoves you, causing you to bump into another cop, that's also an assault by you. If a cop punches you in the face, then your face is responsible for assaulting the cop's fist.
ReplyDeleteBut if a cop repeatedly sprays a woman's vagina with mace, that doesn't constitute an assault, nor even a reason for the cop to be fired.