Yale says protocol followed on report of black woman

HARTFORD, Conn. — Yale University said campus officers “followed procedures” this week when a white student called police after she discovered a black student sleeping in a residence hall common area.

In an email to students Wednesday, Kimberly GoffCrews, vice president of student life at Yale, said officers also spoke with the student who called the police and “admonished the complaining student that the other student had every right to be present.”

During an encounter early Tuesday, police took nearly 20 minutes to determine that Lolade Siyonbola, the young woman who had been sleeping on a couch, was in fact a Yale student. Siyonbola live-streamed two videos of the incident on Facebook, one of which has been viewed more than 1 million times.

Karen Peart, a Yale spokeswoman, said university police took proper steps to “verify that the person about whom they received the call was a student and a resident.”

Peart said Yale would nevertheless review the call and the responding officers’ conduct, “as we do with every incident.”

The incident at Yale’s Hall of Graduate Studies is the most recent in a string of police encounters prompted by calls from white bystanders about black people later found to have committed no crime. In one case, two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks while they waited for a friend.

Asked whether she believed the Yale police officers acted appropriately, Siyonbola said in an email, “absolutely not.”

“I know with absolute certainty that if I was white 1) the police would not have been called,” she said, “and that 2) if they were, I would not have been detained for nearly 20 (minutes) for absolutely no reason.”

Siyonbola showed officers her student ID about two minutes after they arrived, but Peart said the encounter was drawn out because of a spelling mix-up, explaining that “the name on her card was her preferred name (which we allow students to use) and did not exactly match her name in the university records.”