Students take to the streets, burning couches and disturbing the residents, historically making their way to the Cedar Village Apartments.

But this past December, students did it again immediately following the football team’s Big Ten championship victory. Thousands of students descended on Cedar Village, setting fires in the streets. They dismantled street signs and uprooted trees. Someone even pitched a TV out of a fifth story window.

With March quickly approaching, the city has been strategizing with the university to develop a platform for preventing future disturbances on such a large scale. Their main message to students: Don’t go — or else.

City officials hope that by throwing the book at students arrested last December, others will realize that even seemingly innocent bystanders are responsible. Without an audience thirsty for destruction, there would be no fires, they say.

As a way to prove their point, one student recently was sentenced to 45 days in jail for actively fueling a fire. His professional career could be over. If all goes well, others will hear about it and stay away next time. Or at least that’s the idea.

Last Friday, East Lansing leaders told The State News editorial board they’ve tried nearly everything. They’ve tried being nice. They’ve tried tear gas. Now, they’re making a few individuals pay for the sins of the whole group.

And they want you to know it could be you next time if you go.

“We’ve had the ordinance of being within 300 feet of a fire for several years,” East Lansing Police Chief Juli Leibler said in the meeting. “It’s not a secret.”

Some students still didn’t know about the ordinance when they made their way to Cedar Village last December, or at least didn’t think police would target them. For many of us who heard stories and saw photos of the celebration on Twitter, the consequences of standing within 300 feet of an open fire without the intent to extinguish it just weren’t on our minds. Some people were just hoping to tell their children they witnessed another Cedar Fest.

But police have caught on to some students’ desires for a good story, especially one involving tear gas.

“When we use tear gas, that’s what the crowd wants and it just perpetuates this over and over again because they can say they were in the riot and they got tear gassed and it was all in good fun,” Leibler said. “It’s not the best option, it’s the last option.”

Leibler said the best option is for people not to participate in the events or watch them unfold, and if that means arresting people at the scene, then that’s what police are going to continue to do.
A male student arrested last December who asked to remain anonymous previously told the State News he was being used as an example by the city. And he is right.

“I feel that I, among others, was arrested under the ordinance in order to be made an example of, rather than to quell any instance of my wrongdoing,” he said. “They couldn’t get those who started the fire, so they took whoever they could.”

Leibler said police tried to arrest those closest to the fire first so that others at the scene would notice and leave the area as well.

East Lansing Fire Marshal Gerald Rodabaugh said safety is a major motivation to shut the large celebrations down at Cedar Village, both because of the inability for vehicles and officers to reach potentially injured people in the crowd and because the materials thrown into the fire can lead to explosions.

“In past years, we’ve had propane tanks in the fires,” Rodabaugh said. “They heat up, they pressurize, they burst.”

In a large crowd of people, it would be easy for someone to get hit in the head by flying debris, accidentally fall into a fire or even be stabbed in the midst of an argument.

Although it doesn’t seem fair for a student just hoping to witness the events to be punished and prosecuted so that the city can send a message to the rest of the MSU community, East Lansing police are not going to stop trying to enforce the laws.

Of course we can’t get every student to avoid Cedar Village in the midst of a celebration or Spartan loss. But it is important to be aware of the city ordinances and the potential dangers of participating.

East Lansing City Manager George Lahanas said the implications students face for being arrested for participating in the civil disturbances at Cedar Village are a terrible thing. But it’s necessary to send a message to students, he said.

“People come to MSU because they have good potential … and to have that happen is such a waste of effort,” Lahanas said at the meeting. “I’ll be much happier if we never have to have someone go to jail for this again.”

Yes, we technically should have already known of the city ordinance, and it might have kept some unlucky students out of the hands of police. But how many of us really knew it existed? With a quarter of MSU’s population graduating and campus being replenished with new students each year, it’s understandable many were unaware.

But as we see our classmates take the stand and be punished for their role in the fires, we need to recognize city leaders aren’t messing around.

The police and fire departments are going to continue to do their part to keep the community safe, and that means we should expect consequences for gathering around fires.

Revel at your own risk.