Public Safety increases security for Homecoming concert

The number of attendees at this year’s Homecoming concert almost doubled from past years, however, few issues occurred in relation to the magnitude of the crowd, according to Public Safety.

Deputy Chief, Major Joe Grant, oversaw Public Safety’s role in the Homecoming events and made sure things ran smoothly.

“We’re not a security agency, but a lot of times you do things that are security natured and (the concert) would have been one of the types that we were probably providing security for the concert, and also having a police presence,” Grant said.

The Homecoming Committee requested six Public Safety officers to assist with the concert. Since the concert fell on a Thursday night, the staff was a little larger than other nights but Public Safety did have to request more officers to be on duty.

“When we do bring other people in we have to justify it. We can’t always pay people overtime out of our budget so we have to look at other people to help provide us to pay overtime,” Grant said. “We agreed to split that cost with the Homecoming Committee and we were going to pay for some of them and they were going to pay for some of them.”

Six of the officers on duty were covering inside the concert and six more were patrolling the parking lot of Centennial Center and answering normal calls.

“Not only did we have the 12 officers that worked for Public Safety, I also want to think we had six S.N.A.P. officers inside but I believe we had about two on the outside still running the golf carts and providing the S.N.A.P. service,” Grant said.

S.N.A.P officer Jordan Brown ran security for the VIP section at the concert.

“We didn’t have any problems,” Brown said. “We had a couple people try to sneak in my area and a couple of people try to sneak in downstairs but overall nobody was outside of where they needed to be.”

The patrols outside the concert also only ran into one issue with a student.

“We actually picked up a guy who was walking through (the parking lot) pulling on door handles,” Grant said.

There were a few other incidents inside the concert but none significant according to Public Safety.

“I think it went great,” Grand said. “We had right around 4,000 spectators come in to the event and we only made three arrests.”

The arrests were minor — all alcohol related.

“Any time you get that large of people together, you’re going to have some issues. But we had very few issues for that amount of people,” Grant said.

The S.N.A.P. officers were taken off guard by B.o.B.s stage dive.

“(The dive) was unplanned,” Brown said. “If we had known that was going to happen we would have had more people down there. As it was, we needed more barriers up and we needed more people down there keeping people off the stage and off the subwoofers and stuff.”