The department has received no formal complaints of police wrongdoing at Cedar Fest, where it monitored a crowd of more than 3,000 revelers for several hours before launching 13 canisters of tear gas on an increasingly hostile crowd.

Following the April 2005 disturbances, eight police officers — five from East Lansing, two from MSU and one from the Michigan State Police — had complaints filed against them. Many officers, who students and other people out that night said committed crimes, weren’t able to be identified.

East Lansing police Chief Tom Wibert said the lack of formal complaints proves police have changed their response methods after the 2005 disturbances, which some critics labeled a police riot.

“It’s the total opposite reaction of 2005,” he said.

During the 2005 disturbances, 297 police officers from East Lansing, MSU and other agencies donned riot gear and deployed 299 canisters of tear gas into a crowd of about 3,000 people after MSU’s Final Four loss in the NCAA Tournament. In the aftermath, many citizens and community officials blamed police for turning a peaceful celebration into chaos.

Following the 2005 disturbances, an independent commission of students, residents and local officials was created to review the way police handled the event. After about eight months, the commission created a list of final recommendations for handling future celebratory events that could draw large crowds.

The recommendations included suggestions for police actions before, during and after a celebratory event.

A few recommendations included having police be readily identifiable by badge number, taking better video footage and having better equipment to make dispersal announcements.

For the most part, members of the independent commission agree that police followed through on the recommendations.

Rep. Mark Meadows, D-East Lansing, was East Lansing’s mayor during the 2005 disturbances and was the chairman of the review commission.

“I feel the police response was consistent with what we recommended through the review commission,” he said. “Nobody has any question about what occurred, nobody has any question about the police actually being attacked.”

But Joe Tuchinsky, a member of the Lansing chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union as well as a member of the review commission, said there are still improvements that could be made. Among them, he said police should have set up a decontamination site for individuals who had been affected by tear gas to receive treatment.

“That wasn’t done, and it should have been,” Tuchinsky said. “It wouldn’t have been hard to do.”

Wibert said police’s decision not to set up the station was because they didn’t expect to use tear gas.

“We went into the night under the belief that we weren’t going to be using tear gas,” Wibert said. “We also have a problem with finding someone who is willing to decontaminate.”

Tuchinsky also said he would have liked to see police recruit a group of volunteers to attend Cedar Fest as liaisons between police and citizens.

The recommendation was a contested one among the commissioners, some of whom felt that it could endanger the volunteers, said Beth Alexander, MSU’s university physician and a member of the 2005 commission.

“People in that role can get hurt or get in the way of the police doing their work,” Alexander said.

Alexander said police have not adhered to every recommendation, but they’ve made huge progress since 2005.

“Police really worked hard to contain the crowd in ways that didn’t provoke more response,” Alexander said.

Wibert will be the first to say the way police handled the 2005 disturbances was anything but perfect. But, he said, the department has come a long way since then.

“The 2005 riot was the one where I think we learned the most,” Wibert said. “That’s because we had the opportunity to spend several months just picking apart this incident layer by layer.”