What could be Ohio University’s last spring fest season has come and gone, but the aftermath of the parties landed 353 people in handcuffs, 240 of whom were arrested by Ohio Investigative Unit agents for underage consumption.
The unit, a branch of the Ohio Department of Public Safety, comprises sworn state officers who work full-time for the unit in Athens. Sometimes, agents from the Columbus branch are called in to assist during larger events, such as fests or Halloween.
The agents are called in during fests to focus specifically on underage drinking, said Julie Hinds, a spokeswoman for the unit, adding that this allows local law enforcement to focus on crowd control.
“Communication is always open. They ask us to come to something, and we’re there to help them out,” she said. “If we ever need it, hopefully they can help us out.”
But local law enforcement can still make arrests while the undercover agents are in town, said Ohio University Police Chief Andrew Powers.
Although helpful, the agents’ presence doesn’t change the attitude and operation plans of police, he added.
“They’re just another agency that has jurisdiction, and they focus on alcohol violations because that’s their agency’s mission,” Powers said. “There’s nothing more complicated to it than that.”
Still, the unit consistently makes more arrests than local law enforcement, including about 81 percent of arrests from this year’s fest season. About 83 percent of the unit’s arrests were for underage drinking.
The undercover agents are more apt to make those arrests because they’re in everyday clothing as opposed to police uniforms, Powers said.
And because the unit has jurisdiction anywhere there’s alcohol, local law enforcement, such as Athens Police, doesn’t have a say over how it works.
“They’re down here whenever they want. They answer to their own bosses,” Athens Police Capt. Ralph Harvey said. “They contact us and say, ‘We’re in town,’ so we know that there are plain-clothed officers working in our jurisdiction, but we don’t plan our operations based on other agencies’ operations.”
The two entities work independently of each other, but there’s some communication while the unit works in APD jurisdiction.
Though the department is given a heads-up that the agents will be in town, that serves mostly as a courtesy, Harvey said, adding that there is no formal level of cooperation between the two entities.
“We have done joint operations in the past … but the Athens Police Department is not going to change what we do because we know liquor agents are in town,” Harvey said.
— Laura Scheer contributed to this report.
jj360410@ohiou.edu
