Isobel McClure, Contributing Photographer

Yale Police Department officers arrested an individual who attempted to gain access to Berkeley College using a “cloned” identification card on Wednesday afternoon.

According to YPD Chief Anthony Campbell, police tracked the cloned card after it was used in a burglary at Berkeley last week. Campbell said that the arrestee was not a Yale student or affiliate and that they matched a description of the individual who carried out last week’s burglary, based on video footage of the incident that officers observed.

“We think they’re one and the same,” Campbell told the News.

The University spokesperson wrote to the News that YPD officers were able to quickly locate and arrest the suspect after Yale Dispatch alerted them that the cloned ID had been used at multiple Berkeley entrances. The officers also recovered the falsified ID, according to the spokesperson.

Officers first stopped the suspect around 12:50 p.m. The arrestee told the officer repeatedly that they had an ID card in their bag. Officers proceeded to search through a backpack and a shopping bag that the individual was carrying before the arrest.

Around 1 p.m., the officers led the arrestee away from Cross Campus toward the sidewalk on College Street. There, officers handcuffed the arrestee and brought them into a police car.

Campbell told the News that the arrestee is currently in custody at the New Haven Police Department’s detention center, as of 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, YPD officers continued to search the areas in and around Berkeley, including trash and recycling bins, entryways near the Elm Street gate and surrounding bushes on Cross Campus. Two officers removed trash and recycling bags from the bins near Berkeley’s common room entrance and brought them to an unmarked car parked on Rose Walk in front of Sterling Memorial Library.

Campbell explained that both uniformed and plainclothes officers were involved in the arrest. He said that the plainclothes officers were detectives from the YPD’s detective bureau, who wear plainclothes and “operate throughout campus” at all times. The chief explained that plainclothes detectives worked to surveil the suspect after Yale Dispatch located where the false ID was used, before bringing uniformed officers to make an arrest.

“They were following where the person was trying to use the ID,” Campbell said.

Yale switched to an electronic access system in 1994, which is based on radio-frequency identification technology, or RFID. When held against a card reader, each Yale ID sends out a unique 26-bit number, which is then compared with a centralized list of IDs with access. Because the number associated with an ID does not change, Yale’s ID cards can be prone to cloning if an unauthorized individual reads the card.

On Saturday, Yale Public Safety announced that access to academic buildings — usually open during working hours — would be restricted to ID carriers at all times, beginning on Monday. Campbell called that policy change an “administrative” decision, and said that it was unrelated to the YPD’s attempts to take into custody the burglary suspect.

Campbell did not provide a reason for the restricted access policy, saying it was “above [his] pay grade.” Yale’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications previously communicated that the policy change was due to the “busy time at the end of the semester.”

New guidance from Yale Public Safety instructs community members to ask law enforcement agents spotted on campus who they suspect might be from an “outside” agency for their credentials. If the agents are not YPD officers, the students are instructed to call the YPD’s non-emergency line and wait for an officer to arrive.

Berkeley College, one of Yale’s 14 residential colleges, has entrances on Elm Street, Alexander Walk and Cross Campus.

Nora Moses, Yolanda Wang, Josie Reich, Baala Shakya, Isobel McClure and Jerry Gao contributed reporting.