7 bizarre police reports from Cornell’s Slope Day

Reports of people throwing peanuts, hanging from branches and loudly “studying” were all calls the Ithaca Police Department had to respond to on recent Slope Days, according to a batch of police reports obtained by The Ithaca Voice.

Slope Day, an annual celebration at Cornell University, has a history dating back to 1901, when it was known as “Spring Day.”

After this year’s Slope Day at Cornell, The Ithaca Voice filed a Freedom of Information request with the Ithaca Police Department for the last three years’ worth of Slope Day police reports.

(Cornell police officers also had their hands full this year, charging 12 people for unlawful possession of alcohol, four for unlawful possession of marijuana, one for loitering and two for disorderly conduct.)

Here are the seven most bizarre Slope Day police reports that we came across in the Ithaca Police Department files:

Come again?

The beer at one frat apparently made the brothers hard of hearing.

Police officers arrived at this house to find “at least 20” people yelling and jumping on a third-story Collegetown roof.

“This area is also not fenced or railed off,” the officer noted. “The subjects were jumping, screaming and jumping up and down.”

“I attempted to yell up to the group to have them get down from the roof, which did not work.”

After this failed attempt, the police officer asked a fellow officer to try using his PA system. When the officer did so, several students laughed.

“What? What are you saying?!,” they yelled back, according to the IPD report.

The students listened after being asked a third time. Two brothers of the fraternity then acknowledged the police officers standing on their lawn. The vice-president of the fraternity came outside and was given a ticket.

“I asked them why they didn’t listen the first time we asked them to get down and they said they weren’t sure what we were asking,” the officer said.

“I asked if they heard Officer Hubbell and they said yes. Then I asked what they thought he meant when he said, ‘Get down from the roof,’ and they did not answer.”

The Stop Sign Bandit

Police came upon someone swinging a 2×4 “full strength” into a stop sign on Aurora Street.

“When I got out of my patrol car, the subject set the 2×4 down,” Officer Young said in a report. Police also discovered a wine glass with alcohol.

After taking the suspect downtown, the cops hit him with two tickets for the drink and one for a noise violation. They let him go with just a warning for the stop sign attack.

Got nuts?

Police were called to this Collegetown residence after peanuts were reportedly thrown at a passerby. The peanut throwers asked the passerby, a woman, if she “wanted any nuts,” the report states.

Upon the arrival of officers, it seemed as though all of the nuts were gone. A warning was issued to the peanut gallery.

Study-party

An officer arrived at the house around 6 a.m. after hearing a report of people talking loudly by a window. Luckily, the people in question were just up before the sun rose, studying hard. A warning was issued.

Conservation (of beer) efforts are underway at Cornell

In this report, it became clear to the police officer that Cornell students are far too intelligent to waste beer, especially on Slope Day — water is much cheaper. Case closed.

Litterbug

The police officer watched three young women walking down the street. One held a red plastic cup — a telltale sign that undergraduate mischief is at hand.

After the woman saw the police officer, she placed her cup — filled with what she said was fruit punch and wine — on the lawn of the house she was passing by. The police officer then exited his vehicle and alerted her that she had forgotten her cup. She was issued a ticket for littering.

Hangin’ around

A young woman called police about a man who was trying to hang from a tree branch across the street.

The woman had confronted the man, who had responded by calling her “various unflattering names,” the police report states.

The woman decided to pursue the male on-foot, but eventually stopped and went home instead.