One of the lingering questions raised by Dartmouth’s hair-trigger response to a fledgling pro-Palestinian protest on the Green last May is why police from all over New Hampshire, including a state police Special Operations Unit outfitted in riot gear, were summoned to deal with what was a peaceful, local demonstration.

At this point, nobody should expect a candid answer from either the college administration or Hanover officials, who circled the wagons in the immediate aftermath of the debacle, in which 89 people, mostly from the Dartmouth community, were arrested and a few of them roughed up.

However, clues may be obtained from records recently pried loose by the Valley News under the state Right to Know law after the town suppressed them for nearly nine months. They detail the arrests of two Dartmouth students — Kevin Engel and Roan Wade — who occupied a tent on the lawn of Dartmouth’s administration building one night last fall as part of another peaceful pro-Palestinian protest. They were charged with criminal trespass, and their court case is set to resume Oct. 28.

The arrest reports show at least two things of relevance here. The first is that Hanover police serve at the beck and call of college officials. No surprise there, but it’s valuable to have it in writing. This from the report of one of the arresting officers, whose sergeant told him that: “Dartmouth wanted the students to remove a tent they placed on the property, but they were refusing to do so. If they continued that course of action, it was Dartmouth’s intent to trespass the students inside the tent from the property along with the help” of the Hanover Police Department.

For his part, the sergeant’s report says that Dartmouth’s director of security “provided us with Dartmouth’s position that no person would be permitted to erect a tent on the lawn of Parkhurst Hall, and their refusal to remove any tents would result in the issuance of a trespass notice. Their refusal to leave would then subject them to arrest for criminal trespass.” (So much for “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”)

The second point of interest here is that once beckoned, Hanover police answered the call with tactical exuberance. After a full briefing, officers were detailed to “arrest team 1” and “arrest team 2” and told to “stage behind Parkhurst Hall” while their sergeant talked to the protesters in the tent. If Engel and Wade refused to vacate the premises, the arrest teams would be summoned by radio and “approach from the rear.”

Which is what happened. The two students, though, were entirely cooperative, in keeping with the pacific nature of their protest.

With this background, it is not hard to figure out why a phalanx of cops descended on the Green last spring. It can be inferred that in responding to Dartmouth’s panicked call to remove the protesters on the evening of May 1, Hanover police chose to enlist overwhelming force to break up the demonstration — a choice better suited to a military operation in a combat zone.

That conjecture is supported by comments made by Police Chief Charlie Dennis at a forum in August. As the Valley News reported at the time, Dennis said that “to determine the staffing, equipment or other resources needed to manage a large event such as a demonstration, police first assess potential risks, which includes looking at similar events occurring nationwide or regionally as well as historical data. The department uses this analysis to create an operational plan, which includes what additional resources — such as assistance from other law enforcement agencies — may be necessary.”

Given the detail of the operational plan developed to deal with two lonely protesters last fall, the one for the May demonstration must have been on steroids.

To say the least, this is not our idea of community policing, unless maybe your community is New York or Chicago. If the Hanover Police Department’s frame of reference for this event was the chaos at Columbia or on other campuses nationally or the supposed presence of “outside agitators,” it failed at the first duty of community policing, which is knowing your community intimately and being acquainted with its values.

To our knowledge, the Dartmouth protesters showed no tendency toward violence. To bring police violence to bear on them was a gross misreading of the situation, one that was perhaps made inevitable by a massive concentration of force.

Both the college administration and the police are culpable for this wildly disproportionate response, but ultimately the college — which failed to know and trust its own students, faculty and staff — bears the primary responsibility.