By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber on Wednesday defended the way he responded to a black university professor being arrested in Princeton earlier this year, despite calls from the town that he should have been supportive of local police.
Mr. Eisgruber, at his annual meeting with Mayor Liz Lempert and the Princeton Council in Monument Hall, was drawn back into the controversy surrounding Imani Perry, who was pulled over in February for speeding and later arrested on a warrant for unpaid parking tickets. A few days after her arrest, his letter to the editor was published in the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, in which he said he shared the concerns people had about the matter, including her being patted down by a male officer and handcuffed to a desk while she was being booked in police headquarters.
The matter exploded into a racial controversy, fueled by comments Ms. Perry made on social media. An investigation by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office exonerated the white police officer involved and Ms. Perry ultimately pleaded guilty and paid a fine.
On Thursday morning, Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller issued a statement criticizing Mr. Eisgruber.
“As an ally to the Black Lives Matter movement — as I’m sure my fellow council members are also — I believe intellectual dishonesty by a college president damages rather than helps efforts to address disparate treatment in police practices,” she said.
“The Imani Perry incident is now being held up as a counter example by racists who blame African Americans for being killed by police after being stopped for minor infractions. President Eisgruber seems to be afraid that acknowledging the truth, that our officer behaved honorably, will taint his reputation as a champion for justice. That bothers me and that’s why it’s been hard to let go.”
On Wednesday night Ms. Crumiller told Mr. Eisgruber that the town had created policies, like disclosing police stops and use of force of incidents by race and standardizing procedures across the board such as handcuffing, in a move to be at the “forefront” of addressing disparate treatment by law enforcement. She asked him whether he thought the department followed correct procedures in the Perry case and “was blameless,” in her words.
“I don’t think you acknowledged that, actually even after it happened, that our police were following good procedures,” Ms. Crumiller told him.
Mr. Eisgruber said police had followed department procedures in the matter, based on an investigation of the incident. He offered that he had “great respect” for police Chief Nicholas K. Sutter and what the police force has done, something he said he had previously expressed in an email to Ms. Crumiller and other officials this year.
“I respect the way the chief runs his department, the way Princeton officers carry out their duties and the way they carried out their duties in that case,” he said.
Yet he also said he respected the “pain” Ms. Perry endured and the reaction she had to the matter.
“If I had been through that and was suddenly finding myself handcuffed to a chair,” he said, “I’d be asking, ‘What the heck? Why me, why are they handcuffing me to a chair at this point?’ ”
Later, he said: “I think it was important, under the circumstances that we faced, and that our students were thinking about as they looked at what was happening to a professor who was generally beloved by them, for me to recognize the experience that she went through and the experiences that some of those students had had in their communities and we have had on our campus.”
Councilwoman Jo S. Butler later in the meeting offered that police had handcuffed Ms. Perry as a standard protocol for the safety of officers, and noted that Ms. Perry was able to use her cell phone with her other hand when being booked.
Yet Mayor Liz Lempert did not let the matter drop and pointed to how Ms. Perry was pulled over for “doing something wrong” when police clocked her going as fast as 67 mph in a 45 mph zone on Feb.6 on Mercer Road. Ms. Perry was also driving with a suspended Pennsylvania driver’s license, as she is a resident of that state.
“She was speeding and potentially endangering the life of people who are in that neighborhood who are walking. And that’s why she was pulled over,” Mayor Lempert said.
“And I think that’s what was so painful to the community, is that there was not a recognition, a full recognition, that that there was wrongdoing,” Mayor Lempert said. “But to ignore the fact that the police were right in pulling her over and she wasn’t being pulled over because of her race — she was being pulled over because of her speeding.”
For his part, Mr. Eisgruber held his ground. He said that on one hand, it was appropriate for police to stop her for speeding.
“But her complaints were about the way the search was conducted and about the handcuffing afterwards,” Mr. Eisgruber said. “And those were things that were very hard for people on our campus to understand in the context of a country where traffic stops turn into other things at times.”
“What I think has to be recognized,” he said, “is at a time when we have a good person in Professor Perry and a good town and a good police force, that when things unfold in a country with a history like ours, that one is going to have to recognize that even when people are doing things they shouldn’t have done, that you’re going to have incidents that unfold where one has to recognize the complexities of the story.”
He said that during that period of the Perry matter, faculty and students came to him sharing stories of incidents in Princeton where they were pulled over or treated inappropriately based on what they thought was their race.
“And I know that we have a chief now and a council who have made efforts, successfully I think, to improve the way that people are treated,” Mr. Eisgruber said.
“But when I’m talking to a community that I lead and talking not in a way that said that Imani Perry was right about what happened but that agreed with you, Liz, and agreed with this council that there had to be an investigation of what went on, I have a responsibility to be listening to what’s being said by those people who are also in pain under those circumstances,” he continued. “At no point in that, at no point, did I say that what the Princeton police had done was wrong.”
The Perry case came a few months after black students staged a 36-hour sit-in at Mr. Eisgruber’s Nassau Hall in November with a series of demands that included removing former President Woodrow Wilson’s name from the public policy school and having blacks only housing. It also came amid a heightened focus nationally on police tactics.
