On the evening University of New Hampshire police arrested 12 people outside the building that would soon become her office, Elizabeth Chilton was 3,000 miles away, serving as the Chancellor of Washington State University’s flagship campus.

Six days later, the University System of New Hampshire Board of Trustees named Chilton UNH’s 21st president.

Since she began the job in Durham on July 1, no topic has occupied more of Chilton’s time than the fallout from the pro-Palestine protest last May, she said at a community forum last month.

In certain ways, the events that unfolded at UNH on May 1 mirrored those that played out on the 72 other college campuses where protesters were arrested last spring. Tents were erected, warnings were issued, riot police were called, and at times forceful arrests were initiated.

But in other ways, what transpired defied the norm. The university police chief himself, while dressed in plain clothes, got into a shoving match with protesters and accused one of assaulting him. The prosecutor who pursued charges against and ultimately reached diversion agreements with many of the 10 students arrested was the same person who tackled to the ground the student accused of assaulting the police chief.

And it all happened so swiftly compared to the weeks-long standoffs on some campuses. Only a matter of hours, rather than days, separated the arrival of the first protesters from the initiation of arrests.

For some, the events that day reinforced the university police’s long-standing reputation as a reactionary department prone to arresting students. In eight of the last 10 years, UNH has ranked in the top 10 in alcohol and drug on-campus arrest rates among public university campuses with more than 5,000 students. In five of those years, UNH ranked first or second in the country. (The two years UNH didn’t rank in the top 10 were in 2020 and 2021, during the pandemic.)

Since May 1, the longtime police chief, Paul Dean, has weathered calls for his resignation, and the university’s Faculty Senate has requested a “transparent investigation.”

Chilton, an archaeologist by training, has alluded to the similarities between her scholarly work and the task of simultaneously reckoning with and moving beyond what occurred outside Thompson Hall on May 1.

“It’s very difficult not having been there – and I’m sure even for people who were there – to really understand the full scope of whose actions had an impact on that day,” Chilton said at the September forum. “I think it’s really important that we understand what happened that day and learn from it so we can apply it in the future.”

Thus far, she has convened a 16-member “working group” of faculty, administrators and one student “to review the events of May 1 with an eye toward strengthening UNH’s policies, procedures, and practices related to expressive activity.” That step has failed to appease those who believe an investigation should be conducted by an independent third party.

In a wide-ranging 50-minute interview with the Monitor last month, Chilton stood by her response to the events of May 1, explained her approach to regaining trust between students and the university police, and vouched for the reputation of the department more broadly.

“May 1 certainly is an event that has shaken the community, has forced us to ask some questions about making sure that we continue to support de-escalation, support communication, support education,” Chilton said. “… But in general, our police department has a very good relationship with students.”

On a 14,000-student campus, views of the university police surely run the gamut, but for many of those present at the May Day protest, the relationship with police remains deeply fraught.

What are the police’s priorities?

The morning after UNH police prosecutor and captain Frank Weeks tackled Aidan Turner to the ground, Turner appeared by video in a jail-issued jumpsuit alongside fellow UNH student Sebastian Rowan.

Prosecutors charged both Turner and Rowan with assaulting UNH officers, the most serious misdemeanors faced by the 12 people arrested. Turner, a soft-spoken junior from Connecticut majoring in recreation management and business, was accused of assaulting Dean, the police chief. Rowan, a 6’3” engineering PhD student and father of a then two-year-old daughter, was accused of hitting two officers in the head with a sign.

In interviews, both men denied assaulting anyone that night, and video captured appeared to back up Turner’s claim. UNH never provided their defense attorneys with any evidence to support the allegations, Turner and Rowan said. After several months, prosecutors agreed to drop all charges against the men in exchange for 40 hours of community service. Both were allowed to maintain their innocence when accepting the deals, they said.

The multi-month ordeal – from the arrests in May to the finalization of legal agreements over the past month – has shaken both men’s sense of safety at their university, they said.

“Knowing that [the officers] know my name and they’ve probably seen those videos and they probably think I’m some dangerous person, it’s not easy having that in the back of your mind,” Turner said in an interview shortly after his charges were dropped in September. “I am a bit worried on campus about the police.”

Rowan, too, said he has felt surveilled by officers since last spring.

“They see me as somebody who’s likely to disrupt campus,” he said.

Rowan and other organizers of the protest had thought the police would refrain from making arrests that night.

“It was something we talked about in the planning. And we all assumed that the bad publicity that would come with a really heavy-handed, immediate response would not be something UNH would want,” Rowan said. “We were wrong, clearly.”

To some, the UNH police response that day felt emblematic of a long-held sense that the police’s priorities had grown out of whack. As the university has topped arrest rate charts over the last decade, annual alcohol-related arrests have soared as high as 309, rivaling numbers at universities like Colorado and LSU, both of which have more than twice as many students. (Dean, the university police chief, wrote that about half of the students who were arrested for liquor law violations in 2022, the most recent year when comparative data was available, were issued “hand summons” rather than taken into custody.)

Abigail Driscoll, the co-executive editor of the student newspaper The New Hampshire, said the department has been at the forefront of shepherding the university through a cultural transformation.

“I think that there’s a general consensus that it’s a bit ridiculous how much they care about busting parties,” Driscoll said of the UNH police. “The university used to have this title of a party school. And now it feels like it’s hard to even get a few friends together at a risk that you’re going to be way too loud and then UNH PD is going to bust your party.”

On the day before our interview, the UNH police had issued a series of alerts about apparent sexual assaults and druggings on campus, which Driscoll said were well-received by those on campus who feel the university has historically not taken sexual assault seriously enough.

“There are so many victims of sexual assault who are saying ‘UNH didn’t care when I was assaulted,’” Driscoll said. “But when there’s a demonstration, there is the biggest police presence I’ve ever seen on campus.”

Many students interviewed referred to Chilton’s emphasis in her first few months on student mental health.

“I’d love for her to think about how the actions of the police have affected my mental health and the mental health of the other students that were arrested because it’s not very good,” Turner said.

What happened that day?

Chilton expressed confidence that the method she’s selected to examine the events of May 1 and the university’s policies and practices more broadly – a working group rather than an independent investigation – is best suited to the moment.

“I’m not convinced that there’s anything to be gained by an independent review – an external review – right now,” she said in the interview. “The campus needs to build trust in its leadership and in the police, and this is one way to begin to go down that road.”

An independent investigation, she said, would cost the university $150,000, an expense that doesn’t seem warranted given in part that she doesn’t “have any evidence to think there were any laws broken by UNH personnel.” Chilton has asked the working group to share its recommendations with her by the end of the semester, and she committed to “keep an open mind” about the next steps after that.

Meanwhile, the university recently released an after-action review of May 1 that the police department conducted of its own response. That review found that “use of force was appropriate,” but also identified nine areas of improvement.

Among them, the department concluded that it should make its policies publicly available. It also recommended that police in riot gear should “either be not involved or staged out of sight.”

The report did not specifically opine on Chief Dean’s physical confrontation with protesters, which the university has repeatedly contended was an attempt at de-escalation, nor on his appearance in plain clothes.

“I engaged protesters in that manner because it was agreed upon that, because I am the Police Chief and known within the community, I would not be in uniform,” Dean wrote in response to questions from the Monitor. (He declined a request for an interview.)

Dean said he was “requested to be in plainclothes by the administration” but declined to identify which administrator made that call. “The decision was made collaboratively among members of [the] administration. I did not object and I did as I was requested,” he wrote in response to a follow-up question.

Some protesters have criticized Dean for not identifying himself. A video of one interaction shows one man repeatedly asking Dean to “show us some identification,” a request which he said he ultimately heeded. Police body camera footage shared by the university from about an hour after that interaction shows a police badge hanging prominently from Dean’s neck, but Dean wrote that his badge was “obscured” earlier in the demonstration.

Who’s in charge of the UNH police?

Though Dean said university administrators specifically asked him to dress in plainclothes for the protest, Chilton described a legal arrangement between UNH and Durham that she said places significant limits on her ability to control how the police department carries out its law enforcement responsibilities.

Dating back to when UNH established its university police force in the 1920s, the state has granted the department its legal authority as an offshoot of the Durham Police Department, rather than by giving the department its authority directly. This means that while UNH officers are university employees, they exist within a reporting structure that ultimately rises to Durham’s police chief as well.

University reporting relationships vary by state and even within states. At Chilton’s former university, Washington State, for example, the university system had direct authority over its officers, she said.

Durham Town Administrator Todd Selig and university administrators said in interviews that they are satisfied with the relationship, which is spelled out in an agreement last affirmed in 2021.

But the dual-reporting structure also raises questions about who is responsible for what.

Chilton said she was unsure if she would have the direct power to discipline officers if they were found to have engaged in misconduct.

“I think that I would need to work with the town of Durham on that,” she said.

University System General Counsel Chad Pimentel later clarified that “if a police officer is found to have violated a university policy, the university I believe could take action.”

“Which is not to say that Durham couldn’t as well,” he added.

The ramifications of this dynamic extend not just to the aftermath of May 1, but to how the university police conducts itself more broadly.

Though Pimentel said UNH administrators “could set enforcement priorities and state a vision for how enforcement would work more broadly,” they can’t tell the police not to enforce state laws. Chilton, for example, said she has no control over the enforcement of the underage drinking laws for which UNH is at or near the top of the national list.

“I would certainly never even encourage – much less direct – our police to do anything that would potentially put our students in harm’s way,” she said. “Underage drinking has caused student deaths across the nation because of no monitoring or peer pressure or what have you, and so we take that very seriously.”

The university is still reeling from the death of a student in 2021 who had attended a fraternity party and bar before drowning nearby. The Durham police, rather than the university police, are responsible for UNH’s off-campus fraternities and the bars on Main Street.

Dean did not directly respond to a question about why his department consistently has one of the highest on-campus arrest rates of any university police department in the country.

Chilton said that while she cannot control the manner in which the police enforce laws, she can influence the “cultural aspects” of the police department. She is focused on strengthening a university-wide emphasis on de-escalation and, even as the working group’s review remains ongoing, has begun working with various arms of the campus to “strengthen communication about those values and ensure we are prepared to emphasize meaningful dialogue,” she wrote in a statement following the interview.

Chilton said the key to rebuilding any trust between students and campus police involves emphasizing the “service aspects” of the department and promoting positive interactions, such as via ride-a-longs with officers. University spokesperson Tania deLuzuriaga also touted significant student interest in self-defense courses offered by the police department, as well as interactions with the department’s service dogs. 

“When you have an incident where students are arrested and there’s video flying around, we see the part that people think is scary to them,” Chilton said. “It creates fear, it creates uncertainty, and so we’re going to do what we can to win back that stronger relationship.”

Moving forward

On the day last month that Turner accepted a deal – from the same UNH officer and prosecutor who tackled him to the ground – that would ultimately lead his charges to be dropped, a Dover District Court judge told Turner that the UNH police “tend to be very understanding of young people and the struggles they have[.]”

“Having read through the probable cause affidavit and dealing with the UNH Police, I don’t remember them ever being overreactive or overcharging in any types of cases,” Judge Sawako Gardner said. “I think because they are a police department attached to the University of New Hampshire, they tend to be, actually … very understanding and lenient and accommodating.”

Though that assessment did not ring true to Turner, it was what Judge Gardner said next that really frustrated him.

Are you “familiar with what’s going on in the Middle East” or was the protest “just something that was happening on campus that you thought would be interesting to join?” Judge Gardner asked.

Turner, who in February had advocated for a ceasefire resolution before the Durham Town Council, responded succinctly, “Yes, I’m familiar.”

To Turner, the exchange with the judge epitomized the benefit of the doubt the university police had received over the past four months.

“I really could not believe that she said that,” Turner said. “I think it was a petty thing to say, an off-handed, unnecessary thing to say, and I think that kind of just proves that she was a little bit biased.”

Judge Gardner did not respond to a request for comment made to state court spokesperson Av Harris. Judges “do not make public comment on individual cases” other than what is said in court or written in rulings, Harris wrote in an email.

Last week, Rowan, the other student charged with assaulting police, accepted a deal similar to Turner’s.

The two students met at the Strafford County Jail on May 1 and 2 and have since become friendly.

Late last month, the Palestine Solidarity Coalition organized its first protest of the fall semester, coinciding with a massive career fair that included weapons manufacturers. As Rowan, donning a keffiyeh, headed off to the demonstration, Turner wished him well but did not follow.

“I didn’t want to be targeted again,” he said afterward.

Instead, Turner headed downstairs to the career fair, where he hoped to secure a position in the Peace Corps.

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.