College block parties become street riots with help from Facebook

Many colleges have semi-official spring celebrations designed to let off a little adolescent steam this time of year, but during the last few years they have turned into out-of-control riots featuring street fires and battles with police.

It turns out that we can thank Facebook for the change.  Students plan the event week in advance and place an advertisement on Facebook, which attracts thousands of additional students from colleges hours away and even from local high schools.

Campus police and local police, who have also taken to Facebook to anticipate these kinds of events, often call in additional troops to deal with the onslaught of intoxicated students. The result are massive confrontations between students and police featuring tear gas, rubber bullets, street fires, overturned cars  and the throwing of rocks and bottles.

You can read about a recent riot at normally preppy James Madison University in a Washington Post article here.  I also wrote about this phenomenon at Kent State and the University of Wisconsin last year.

My personal experience with this took place at Keene State College in New Hampshire, where students planned for weeks a street riot to take place at the end of the World Series. My student newspaper advisees knew about this for weeks and we planned how to cover it,  including ways reporters could remain safe from attacks by either side.

On the evening in question, I noticed that there were state police cars stationed around the campus, and an officer told me they had also been tipped off by the college to expect a riot. It turned out to be the worst kept secret in college history. But when I casually asked the officer what kind of weaponry was involved, he opened the trunk of his cruiser and showed me rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. 

But then he showed me his shotgun and boxes full of shells that he also kept in his trunk. Are those for the students? I asked. Well, he said, you never know when things will get out of control.

Yikes! Suddenly I was worried about my students and called the newspaper office to make sure the reporters and photographers wore badges identifying themselves as journalists, but I was still worried!

It just goes to show how quickly something like this can get out of hand. Once students start fires and attack police, local residents start to get worried and the rules of engagement can quickly change if an officer is injured or private property is damaged. You can add getting shot by police to the long list of things that can happen at party schools.

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