On Saturday, February 14, between about 6:30 and 6:40 p.m., an unidentified man was arrested in the Commons dining hall. According to eyewitness accounts, the man was detained by two Chicago police officers, accompanied by three Public Safety (PS) officers from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
The man had been quietly eating dinner at a table when the group of officers entered the Commons and moved directly for his table. The officers surrounded him and the table and asked him for identification, which the man said that he did not have. The group continued to talk with him for a couple of minutes before one of the police officers and started to arrest the man. The police officers also removed a large backpack from him and put it on the table.
The conversation continued for several more minutes; while much of the conversation was inaudible due to the surrounding noise in the busy dining hall, the officers did repeatedly ask for identification as well as what could be in the backpack. At one point, a manager from the Commons approached the group and appeared to ask about what was happening, but was turned away by one of the PS officers.
Eventually, the police officer with the handcuffs, accompanied by one of the PS officers, escorted the unidentified man out to a nearby patrol car with its lights on, stopped on the short stretch of South Wabash between McCormick Tribune Campus Center (MTCC) and McCormick Student Village (MSV). The car would leave at about 6:55 p.m. with its lights still flashing.
Within the Commons, the remaining police officer had the PS officer sign some sort of paperwork related to the incident before starting to search the backpack. (Notably, while gloves are generally supposed to be used while searching the belongings of a suspect in non-emergency situations, the police officer was not using them during this search.) She pulled out a series of zipper-sealed bags along the top of the bag, and rifled through the contents of one of them, which had several sheets of cut-up paper tightly stacked together inside of it. The officer also appeared to give particularly attention to a lime-green wrapper.
As of the writing of this article, there has been no announcement from PS about this arrest, including campus-wide notifications sent out and reports on their blog that documents all campus incidents (which can be found here: https://blogs.iit.edu/public_safety/). Additionally, as of the writing of the article, the arrest was not listed on the Chicago Police Department’s list of charge press releases (which can be found here: https://www.chicagopolice.org/news-category/charge-releases/). However, this does not include all charges and arrests made.