Trick or treat?

As the City of Madison awakes from what almost universally a very long Saturday night, damage assessments will begin. No notable vandalism, destruction or looting seems to have emerged from this year's massive Halloween celebration on State Street. And that, in and of itself, is an improvement over some of the parties from just my brief tenure at the University of Wisconsin.

But there was tear gas last night. And police donning riot gear. And, although unconfirmed at this point, possibly a house fire.

There will be – if there aren't already – calls in the coming days for an end to this annual festival of pure revelry. But before we go down that road, it seems an opportune occasion to at least take a little while and assess just what went down on State Street in the early hours of this morning.

City officials familiar with the situation are telling me at this hour that there seem to have been numerous incidents of pedestrians being capriciously tear gassed. NBC 15 has raw b-roll footage on its website that seems to, at one point, support this allegation.

Should this prove true, attention needs to shift away from the “riotous” crowd of civilians who were perhaps a touch too slow in abandoning State Street and on to the hundreds of police officers who were there to protect and serve.

There can be little question but that a mob did overtake the city last night. Chants of ritualistic insanity were heard, flagrantly idiotic behavior was engaged in and the site of a man wearing nothing more than a g-string seemed perhaps a touch too normal in the early morning hours. But a slow moving crowd should not be cause for tear gas and the Riot Act.

And so I find myself asking – perhaps wrongfully and almost certainly prematurely at this point in time – whether or not the possibility now exists that this year's “riot” was not caused by a group of out-of-town students but, rather, by a group of in-town cops.