Dalhousie University House Parties Too Lit, 22 People Arrested

On Saturday, 22 students at an off-campus Dalhousie University homecoming party in Halifax were arrested. The arrests come following the university banning alcohol during its orientation week in what it called a "harm reduction" effort.

It was the university's homecoming this weekend, and police estimated that 1,500 people were partying between the span of a few streets in the city.

On Jennings Street, one neighbourhood resident estimated that there were hundreds of people partying, CBC News reports. A video posted on YouTube shows a number of young people dressed in black and gold spilling out from a house onto the porch and lawn, as more of them stand on top of the roof cheering. Meanwhile, multiple police cars pull up, and officers start putting people in police vans.

"It was very strange… The police sort of corralled them up Jennings Street, and there were 200 or 300 people up there just in that little area shouting for their rights and freedoms to behave in this abominable way," a 30-year resident of a neighbouring street, Meredith Annett, told CBC News.

Annett also complained about excessive drinking and the language the partiers were using: "The F-bombs that were dropping were beyond belief," she said.

A student in second year at Dalhousie who lives on the same street, Jeremie Baumeister, expressed concern with how police handled the out-of-control partying.

"I heard that people were just getting taken out of the crowd and just put into the paddy wagon… I heard of many people who got tickets for very obscure reasons such as crossing the road without using the sidewalk," Baumeister told CBC News. "I don't think in that early of day we should be getting noise complaints just because of our neighbours finding the music too loud."

On Sunday, Brian Leadbetter, Dalhousie's director of communications, told the Chronicle Herald that "it would be premature to speculate on what those possible outcomes would be," when it comes to if students who were involved in the off-campus ragers on Saturday being potentially penalized by the university.

"At this stage, we are gathering information about what transpired [Saturday], working collaboratively with police on their next steps," he said. "We will be working through the university's response for the remainder of this week."