People who live in college towns are no strangers to loud nights and rowdy parties of celebrating college students. It should come as no surprise that after the Ohio State Buckeyes defeated the Oregon Ducks 42-20, in the College Football National Championship game earlier this month a lot of celebration from the town’s college students ensued.
According to the Huffington Post, around 1 a.m., Jan. 13, crowds started piling onto the city streets in an attempt to start celebrating right there. After unsuccessful attempts to disperse the crowd using pepper spray, police and SWAT team members began using tear gas. Other rowdy fans set fire to items such as dumpsters and couches and even tore down a goalpost.
According to Ray Coleman, UT Martin police captain, UT Martin students don’t usually get too unruly when they are celebrating, and the campus police have never had to use tear gas or pepper spray to break up a group of people.
“We’re like baseball umpires,” Coleman said. “We’re there and if we don’t have to interfere, we won’t. We want to enforce whatever rules there are. If no rules are being broken, we stay out of it.”
In regard to students celebrating in the street, as the students at Ohio State University were doing, Coleman had a simple answer: pre-planning. If a group communicates with the police that they want to celebrate somewhere, the police sometimes are able to have that area secured and direct traffic elsewhere. Coleman said the only time the police would have to step in would be if there was a threat to life or property, such as if students were blocking access to emergency response entrances.
The campus police usually try not to intervene, as long as everyone is safe and no rules are being broken.
“We pre-plan and set boundaries,” Coleman said, “and as long as everyone remains within those boundaries, we won’t have to intervene.”
