Christopher MacEvitt, who chairs Dartmouth’s religion department and lives on campus, was a late arrival to the pro-Palestinian demonstration on the college’s Green on May 1.

Around 9:30 p.m., after attending a faculty dinner in White River Junction, MacEvitt drove past the Green on the way to his home in a student residential cluster, where he serves as house professor.

The scene on the Green — police vehicles lining the street, floodlights beaming on a large crowd — signaled to MacEvitt that he needed to find out what was happening. In his 20 years of teaching at Dartmouth, he hadn’t witnessed a police presence like this on campus.

After walking to the Green, MacEvitt saw dozens of cops, many of them in riot gear, leading Dartmouth students away in handcuffs. He headed toward an encampment of a half dozen camping tents set up on a small section of the Green.

“As a house professor, I was there to check on students,” MacEvitt said, after I reached out to him this week. “I wasn’t there protesting.”

You wouldn’t know it from reading the Hanover police report on his arrest. (Not that anyone should have been arrested for participating in the nonviolent event.)

According to the report, police observed MacEvitt “circling the protesters that were linking arms, similar to a human chain, in an attempt to refrain (Dartmouth security officers) from gaining access to the erected tents.”

The report’s kicker: “Mr. MacEvitt was then observed turning to the protesters while giving them two thumbs up.”

In the noisy, chaotic setting, MacEvitt said the “thumbs up” sign was his way of asking students if they were OK — nothing more.

“It was interesting that they included that detail,” said MacEvitt, who hadn’t seen the report before I emailed it to him. “Is that what triggered it?”

MacEvitt was among 89 people, a majority of them students, who were cited for criminal trespass when cops from across the state, including a state police special operations unit, flocked to Hanover.

They didn’t come uninvited. Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock’s administration sought the show of force to deter anyone from exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and peaceful assembly.

I came across the details of MacEvitt’s arrest while sifting through nearly 200 pages of Hanover police reports that are public information under the state’s Right-to-Know law.

The reports reaffirmed what I heard from a member of the Upper Valley law enforcement community who was familiar with the operation. With hundreds of people on the Green, it turned into a May Day lottery.

Everyone on the Green that night could have been arrested — which probably would have been fine with Beilock — for not obeying police commands to leave.

Using her substantial prosecutorial discretion, Hanover police prosecutor Mariana Pastore opted this summer not to file charges in 32 of the 89 cases. (MacEvitt was among them.)

Within days of Beilock’s call to arms, Pastore had already dropped the cases against two Dartmouth student-journalists who were snagged by police while just doing their jobs.

A Hanover officer wrote that the student-journalist he arrested, Alesandra Gonzales, “identified herself as press working for The Dartmouth,” a student newspaper. It didn’t stop police from handcuffing, searching and photographing Gonzales before loading her into a Dartmouth Outing Club van to be “processed” at an Upper Valley police station.

Pastore recently offered deals to the 55 others that she charged with a violation — one step below a misdemeanor. If defendants waive their right to a speedy trial, Pastore will place their cases “on file without finding.” If they stay out of trouble — another way of saying no protesting on the Dartmouth campus — between now and Jan. 31, their cases will be “permanently dismissed.” So far, nearly 50 of the 55 have accepted Pastore’s offer.

After reviewing the arrest reports, I see why Pastore raised the white flag. If the reports are the best evidence she’s got, I suspect she’d have a hard time winning at trial.

As she’s done from the start, Pastore declined to comment on the cases or explain her decisions.

By not continuing to press the cases, Pastore is helping out Beilock, who couldn’t have been looking forward to potentially testifying in 55 cases. Beilock saw what happened to several of her Ivy League colleagues when they were placed under oath before Congress last year.

In her first 16 months as president, Beilock has shown that she’s all about protecting the Dartmouth brand and herself. By inviting police onto campus to arrest her own students, Beilock was playing to the college’s wealthy conservative donors and pleasing her bosses on the board of trustees who fret that negative national press, aka Columbia, can take away from Dartmouth padding its $8 billion endowment.

Along with quelling political dissent, Beilock managed to get New Hampshire taxpayers to pick up the tab for cops doing her dirty work.

The cost to Hanover taxpayers amounted to $5,347, including $3,572 in officers’ overtime pay, police records show.

Lebanon had the good sense to bill Hanover for the work 14 of its officers put in. But Hanover refused to reimburse its next-door neighbor, leaving Lebanon taxpayers on the hook for $3,640 in officers’ wages.

Why isn’t Dartmouth paying? It created the mess.

A college spokeswoman told me “police do not normally charge for responding to law violations and Dartmouth has not received an invoice.”

Beilock talks about students taking responsibility for their actions. Dartmouth should do the same.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@ vnews.com.