Editorial: Amherst arrestee’s cellphone video offers chilling view of police conduct

Before Thomas C. Donovan’s cellphone video went dead March 8, it captured an alarming sequence of events: Donovan backing up. Police officers coming toward him. Donovan asserting his right to record police conduct. An officer knocking the phone from his hand. Another officer stomping on it.



In a civil rights lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Springfield, the University of Massachusetts senior from Holliston claims members of the Amherst Police Department falsely arrested him, used excessive force and infringed on his right to film in a public place as officers made arrests during last year’s Blarney Blowout.



This lawsuit won’t be heard for many months. In the unlikely event it isn’t settled out of court, officers will have a chance to explain their motives; their chief and the town manager declined this week to comment on the suit.







For now, the video resurrected from the guts of that abused cellphone testifies to the kind of police response faulted in the Davis report last September. If repeated at the coming Blarney weekend March 6 and 7, this kind of heavy-handed conduct would ensure Amherst and UMass again make news around the world.



The 80 seconds of police interaction captured in the video offer only a tiny window into police response to unruly crowds of students last March. It would not be fair to conclude from this footage that this sort of conduct was commonplace. But what it depicts is chilling.



Officers in riot gear seem to seek out a confrontation with Donovan after he moved toward an area where an arrest was taking place. By trying to destroy his phone, officers may have been punishing him for appearing to challenge their actions. They may have sought to destroy evidence of their conduct.



It took months for Donovan, a legal studies major, to clear his name and restore his right to attend UMass. Charges against him of failure to disperse from a riot and disorderly conduct were dropped last fall. Only after that happened did the school lift Donovan’s suspension, his lawyer said.



At the time of the Davis report’s release in September, Amherst Police Chief Scott Livingstone and UMass Police Chief John Horvath acknowledged that their departments should have handled crowds of students differently. The chiefs have been working for months to shape that new way of responding.



Livingstone said in September that his officers are not trained to back away from the sorts of scenes they encountered. The report said police should have pulled back and waited for help, enabling them to reduce or avoid use of chemical munitions. It urged the departments to embrace the concept of community policing that seeks to avoid an “us vs. them” mentality.



This much is clear: The 80 seconds in the cellphone video show conduct that has no place in policing in this community or any other.









