Last weekend the university community played host to a number of events in and around campus.

The annual spring game, the African-American Heritage Festival and the student block party known as Chittfest combined drew an overwhelming number of people to the Columbus area. With the recent history of riots and other delinquent student activities, area authorities were prepared to supply the manpower to account for any disruptive behavior.

Although the security forces were in place to deal with the large crowds, the only real disturbance was the increase of traffic flow in and around the city.

“The spring game and other events in the area brought in more people as far as fans, but that’s how it usually goes when we have football games here,” said Sgt. Brent Mull, a spokesman for the Columbus Division of Police.

“There are special units or state patrol that cover the traffic duties. The outlying areas were a little congested, but that’s usually expected,” Mull said.

The Heritage Festival, which had been moved to an earlier date this year, called for an increase of security guards for its events running April 24 through Saturday. Each event was set up indoors and planned very smoothly by its organizers, said Ron Michalec, University Chief of Police.

“Student organizers made it very clear which events were part of the festival and which events were not,” Michalec said.

“Everyone involved did an excellent job in the planning process, and the organizers set everything up indoors away from any traffic congestion,” he said. “The Saturday evening ‘cruise’ was never part of the festival, and I think students wanted to separate themselves from what has happened here in the past.”

Last year nearly $600,000 was spent to supply the adequate amount of police force during the weekends of Chittfest and the Heritage Festival. Following such a smoothly ran weekend with little disturbance, Mull said the number of officers for the weekend was reduced dramatically.

“We had about the same numbers of officers as in the past, but this time around, the deployment was very different,” Mull said. “We won’t even come close to meeting the amount of money spent supplying overtime personnel as we did a year ago. Saturday evening was so light we even reduced the amount of officers that were out patrolling.”

The University Police likewise had to worry little about supplying extra forces in the area. The majority of the events of the Heritage Festival and the spring game supply their own security officials to each event. University officials are required to contribute extra officers to make up for what the sponsors of the events cannot afford.

Michalec said supplying a small portion of units over the weekend was not a problem, and the only real area of concern was a small traffic backup Saturday night.

“We had a few people work overtime on Saturday to coordinate traffic patterns because of a light traffic jam on campus, as a result of Chittfest,” he said. “Overall though, there were no surprises and everything went fantastically smooth.