In its editorial columns, the News deplored the "shocking" treatment of the riot by New Haven police: "Police brutalities were a matter of astonishment and outrage to onlookers..." Several students reported they were beaten over the head and legs with billy clubs. Others protested they were booked on charges of which they were completely innocent. However, of the four students arrested, three were eventually fined a total of $125.
The News also regretted the treatment given the matter by a New Haven newspaper: "No written words could have been better contrived to poison town and gown relations than the... Registrar's viciously biased report and editorial ... on the riot ... It is a tragic pity that the staggering community problem posed by City-University relations could only be met by venom and bombast... The present critical situation has been one that called for... understanding, perception, and maturity. These qualities were conspicuously lacking on both sides..."
Death in the Old Days
The ice cream riot was the first colossal eruption since the Cornell skirmish of 1947, when students derailed trolley cars, smashed store windows, and roughed up townspeople. But before that, Yale New Haven history is rife with tales of bloody encounters.
According to a News of 1939. "Town and Gown brawls in the sixties would invariably result in a death, and it would be fortunate if the mortality were kept down to one or two participants. Gun-fire and flashing knives typified these scraps... clubs and bricks were strewn far and wide..."
When, in 1864, a student stabbed a New Haven man to death. Yalies gathered firearms of every sort, congregated in two buildings, and dug in for a sizable siege. Furious townspeople rolled three cannon onto the Green, facing the buildings. President Wooley frustrated students not to sheet until fired upon, but then to shoot accurately. However, police managed to quash the oncoming slaughter.
Perhaps the most colossal riot took place in 1919. An army of veterans, marching past Yale en route to Hartford, drew Bronx cheers from Yalies who were watching from their windows on Old Campus. Soon, thousands of students poured out of their dormitories and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the veterans, nearly demolishing Old Campus. Hours afterwards, strife-riddled ranks of veterans and Yalies went their respective ways, having added another bloody page to the gory history of New Haven's Town-Gown relations.