The View from on High

CAMBRIDGE — During Tuesday rush hour on Massachusetts Avenue — 100 yards south of the traffic median where, four days earlier, a naked 21-year-old black Harvard student was tackled to the ground and punched repeatedly by city police — a two-man TV crew standing on the edge of the Cambridge Common park was the only marker of the latest national example of police violence against black men.

“We want to focus on the moments after the arrest,” the young blond newsman, sharply dressed in clean tan shoes, jeans, and a green, quilted jacket, said crisply over and over, running through his lines with his hands half in his pockets, bobbing up and down against the cold. “A journalism professor tells us that people see what they want to see as well as what they’re conditioned to see.”

“What happened,” he recited. “What happened.”

“See what you want to see.”

The Friday arrest was captured by several onlookers with camera phones. This footage has been embedded in most news stories about the arrest, and has been picked up around the world.

“Still trying to figure out what happened,” said the newsman on the street, for the twelfth time.

At about 5:45 p.m., the sun briefly peeked through the clouds, shining for the last time on a toddler soccer practice on the far side of the park. The newsman repeated his lines, the cameraman got his shot, the pair packed their gear into a black Ford Explorer parked at an expired meter, and drove away.

There was nothing left to see. The formerly semi-curious commuters now walked past, talking of taxes and their own problems. Nothing marked the spot.

Dusk fell. The breeze, blowing from the west as the purple clouds rolled in over the Sheraton Commander hotel’s large red marquee, smelled strongly of marijuana.

On their usual bench near the park’s Civil War memorial, a group of hooded figures was blaring rap music, sharing joints and cigarettes.

Harvard campus rumor has it — rumors and police allegations relayed by most outlets (Boston Globe, local NPR station WBUR, New York Times, Washington Post) — that the arrested student, Selorm Ohene, had been high.

Completely unreported by the national and international press was the fact that the arrest had occurred the night of Harvard’s Yardfest, an annual outdoor concert.

Four hours before the arrest, Cambridge streets and Harvard paths had been full of intoxicated Harvard students weaving around invisible obstacles, many — for the most part charmingly — talking perhaps more loudly and more passionately than any wasted youth had ever talked before, primarily on the all-important subject of the extent of their very-drunkenness.

A staff writer for the student paper The Harvard Crimson, Luke Vrotsos, explained in a recent article that before the musical event many students attend Harvard-House-Committee-sponsored block parties with “bouncy castles, free shirts, and free alcoholic drinks for students over 21.”

According to Vrotsos, concert-goers began to disperse around 9:05 p.m. In a different article, the Crimson noted the approximate time of the student’s arrest on Massachusetts Avenue as 9:09 p.m.

Cambridge Police Public Information Officer Jeremy Warnick said that the only potentially concert-connected incident that Cambridge PD responded to on Friday was Ohene’s arrest.

In recent history, Yardfest — which has been celebrated on campus since 2006 (before, a similar event had been known as Springfest) — has not adversely affected city police work.

“I’ve only been here four years, but in my four years. . . it [Yardfest] has not been an incident that’s had significant ripple effects for us,” Warnick said.

Harvard has its own private police force on its Cambridge and Boston campuses. The Harvard University PD’s logs for Friday, April 13 overnight into the early hours of Saturday, April 14, list only one incident tied to partying — a noise complaint filed shortly after midnight. Not unusual for a Friday night.

The city’s medical transport provider, PRO EMS, has not responded to our request for information about its workload that Friday.

At their park bench, the denizens of the Common had heard about Friday’s arrest. They had thought last week’s big party had been graduation. For their part, they were certain that drugs had been involved.

They said things that so far no one else has said. Obvious things, but only if you know what drugs do to a man. They spoke with a kind of sympathy, a united brotherhood of the very bad trip.

One man said he had been at the bench on Friday, and that he’d seen the arrest, or that, at least, he’d seen the crowd around it.

“It was that nice-ass day,” he said, taking charge of the narrative. There were four others around the bench, listening and adding details.

The witness was a man they called XO. He was wearing a baseball cap decorated with a picture of a man and a pit bull and the words “Rest in Peace Chico.” XO was the storyteller. His other, possibly more important, role was that he had a pack of Newport cigarettes which he occasionally shared with the others. He knew many things that the others did not know.

The two topics the group was interested in were: firstly, the true extent of the man’s nakedness; secondly, the question, unresolved as yet, of what, if anything, the student had been on. The first topic held their amused attention, but about the second they were tender. Understanding. More understanding, certainly, than the police had proved themselves to be.

“He was on some shit,” XO said. “Homie probably took something he wasn’t supposed to take. He was butt-ass naked.”

A black man in a hoodie seated to XO’s right raised an eyebrow and nodded. He was smiling vacantly.

“I heard he had a Speedo on,” the lone woman in the group interjected.

“Can you write this down word for word?” her white 19-year-old boyfriend asked. “N*****-was-butt-ass-naked.” (Could not write it word for word.)

“It didn’t have anything to do with race,” argued XO, who is Hispanic and says that he has his own problems with the police. “It could have been some white dude.”

To the stoners, the use of such force was unnecessary and objectionable because the man obviously was stoned and should have been recognized as such.

In their analysis, the rejection of all clothes and the question of which powder or plant had induced it are related. On this topic, the small group became clinical and passionate. For a while, they were interested in solving the mystery. What was it? Something that made you feel hot — hot enough to take off all your clothes.

The boyfriend, who very soon was ready to be definitive on this topic, and who also stated that as a child he seen a streaker arrested in Virginia, concluded that the student had “probably done molly and acid.” A boy with short dreadlocks who had mostly been quiet until now — holding onto his bike in a way that immediately made one think of a little boy at the park — suggested “morning glory seeds.”

“It’s a plant! It’s a plant!” clarified a tall guy circling the group like a great bird, popping up right next to us, very close, very helpful. Morning glory seeds have LSA, he explained, before suggesting to his friend that the seat on that bike “alone” was worth 20 bucks.

The question was left unresolved as darkness fell. “I don’t fuck around with that shit,” XO said. “I just smoke weed.”