Tuesday, November 24, 1998
Police break up victory party after compliant by neighbors
UCPD: University officers, LAPD jointly don riot gear to contain
students exuberant over defeat of Trojans
By Ann Hawkey
Daily Bruin Staff
Hundreds of students took to the streets of Westwood Saturday
night, celebrating UCLA’s victory over USC.
University police and LAPD also took to the streets that night,
trying to combat the large, rowdy crowd that formed outside a party
at 424 Landfair Ave.
UCPD officers initially responded to a disturbing the peace
complaint at the address, but party-goers were immediately hostile
to the police presence, UCPD assistant police chief Karl Ross
said.
"As soon as they saw the police units begin to arrive they began
pouring into the street and shouting epithets," he said.
When police came to control the event, hundreds of party-goers
formed a crowd in the street, and then began moving down Landfair
Avenue toward Gayley Avenue.
Party-goer Anoush Hakimi, a third-year political science
student, said that the party didn’t get out of control until police
came.
"Mostly everybody was just cheering for UCLA," he said.
But many of the party-goers were visibly drunk, and their
celebratory chants against USC turned to angry chants against the
police as the party moved into the street, police said.
Several beer bottles and cans were thrown in the direction of
the officers, and two UCPD cars were damaged. No officers were
injured, according to police.
All available UCPD officers were deployed to the location, as
well as 25 LAPD officers and one LAPD helicopter.
Officers wore helmets to protect themselves from the bottles and
formed a line to try to prevent the mob from moving further down
the street.
"The street was flooded with people and it was impeding
traffic," Hakimi said. "It was kind of a dangerous situation to
have all those drunk teenagers in the street."
The crowd finally began to disperse when it reached Gayley, and
by 2:40 a.m. the streets had calmed down – more than two hours
after the initial complaint was made.
Neither LAPD nor UCPD made any arrests during the disturbance,
focusing instead on breaking up the crowd.
"If you try to go after the little guy, it distracts you from
the big problem, so you want to go after it as a whole," said
Sergio Guzman, LAPD’s senior lead officer for the Westwood
area.
Westwood also faced disruptive crowds after last year’s UCLA-USC
football game, following an on-campus dance, Ross said.
The biggest problem UCLA has faced with raucous crowds, however,
came after the men’s basketball team won the national championship
in 1995, when hundreds of rowdy students took to the streets of
Westwood Village, eventually breaking several windows and needing
to be dispersed by police.
Although the crowd Saturday night seemed only to become rowdier
with the police presence, one party-goer said the police needed to
intervene.
"I don’t know what would have happened if they weren’t there,"
said Brandon Schindelheim, a fourth-year psychology student.
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