There’s been much talk — all of it hostile toward one group or another — about the “riots” at the University of Minnesota over the weekend of the NCAA Men’s Hockey Tournament.

I visited my friend Luke, a U of M student, in the Cities over Easter Break and got an inside perspective on the whole thing. And though there’s plenty of evidence to formulate an argument against either the cops or the students, from what I heard, the weekend should be a lesson in the absurdness of mob mentality and the dangers of extreme reactions to it.

Luke and his apartment-mate Fernando were in the midst of the madness as observers drawn out not by the parties and bars that flooded the streets after the first game, but by their curiosity in seeing the “riots” their friends were texting them about.

After taking a few cell phone videos, they were ready to leave. Since they arrived, however, a line of police had formed across the street they needed to take in order to get back home.

Fernando approached slowly and tried to explain that their apartment was just behind the line, but the cops wouldn’t listen. A split second later, Fernando was maced on the street, an experience he described as his face being “scraped raw with sandpaper before having acid poured all over it.”

Someone caught the whole thing on camera, and Fernando thought about taking it to the police, but he realized the trouble he would have to go through to have anything come of it would make the whole idea not worthwhile.

Meanwhile, dozens of students — including reporters of the student newspaper — Luke told me, had been shot with rubber bullets and threatened by police on horses.

But the night was far from an extreme, police-instigated nightmare, though it seems from what I heard that it was the police presence that made the night escalate into what it did.

On the other side, what made Luke less ready to jump to defend the students was how they went about their hyped-up “riot.”

From the start, a few red flags told him their actions would be misguided.

Girls would run up to the line of riot-geared police in the middle of the action, crouch down, make duck faces and snap selfies before sprinting back to their collar-popping, flatbrim-wearing, slur-chanting boyfriends puffing on expensive cigars cheering on their buddies climbing the streetlights. Luke’s videos were pretty telling on this account.

It wasn’t a “riot” comparable to any kind of meaningful protest involving activists seeking change. It wasn’t even just students celebrating something together. From what I’ve heard second hand, it just turned into an excuse for privileged suburbanite students to flash their money and youth, and for police to get riled up, test out their riot gear, helicopters and mounted officers and abuse a few teenagers.

I’m not sure what any of them accomplished, but at least it sounds like people on both sides of the tear gas had fun “playing riot.”

 Will Beaton is the Editor-in-Chief of The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].