By Gus G. Sentementes , gus.sentementes@baltsun.com|November 06, 2008
A group of at least 16 people, including a Johns Hopkins University professor, said they were wrongfully arrested during a spontaneous post-election celebration early yesterday in Charles Village. But Baltimore police say officers acted to disperse a large, loud crowd after receiving complaints from neighbors and a nearby hospital.
None of those arrested, who gathered outside Baltimore's Central Booking and Intake Center after their release about 9 a.m. yesterday, were charged with a crime, they said. Some said they had been threatened with charges of inciting a riot and disorderly conduct, though they said the gathering of about 200 people was peaceful but loud.
"It was nonsense," said Aaron Goodfellow, 41, a professor in Hopkins' anthropology department. Goodfellow said he and a graduate student left an election-night party after news broke that Sen. Barack Obama was elected president. They saw the gathering and stopped to participate, and both were later arrested, he said.
"It was just pure enthusiasm. There was no destruction of property," Goodfellow said. About the arrests, Goodfellow said: "It was out of control, excessive and, yeah, I'm really angry."
Sterling Clifford, a Baltimore Police Department spokesman, said officers had been monitoring the gathering at St. Paul and 33rd streets for two hours. About 2 a.m., he said, police received five complaints from the neighborhood about the loud noise, including one from nearby Union Memorial Hospital, and "made the determination it was time to close it down."
"As is sometimes the case, there were people who did not want to go home," Clifford said.
Clifford said Union Memorial reported that one of its entrances and a nearby intersection were blocked by members of the crowd. He said the crowd was chanting: "These are our streets. We won't go."
"We made a reasonable effort to accommodate those people," Clifford said. "You can't just let it go on indefinitely, partly out of concerns for their safety, and partly out of concerns for the neighborhood."
Some of the participants interviewed yesterday morning said the crowd was loud but that they weren't in the streets when they were arrested. Some were Hopkins students, while others were area residents or students from other schools, including Goucher College and Towson University.
