How SLO police kept 7,000 partying St. Fratty’s students from becoming a riot
St. Fratty’s Day brought thousands of college-aged partiers to the streets of San Luis Obispo on March 16 — the majority packed into one neighborhood near Cal Poly on Hathway Avenue.
What it didn’t bring was lines of police officers in riot gear and armed for a fight, a noticeable change from past unsanctioned street parties like Mardi Gras and Poly Royal, both of which eventually were shut down after the partying erupted in violence.
St. Fratty’s Day has grown substantially in recent years, with numbers swelling to nearly double what they were the year before, San Luis Obispo Police Department Chief Rick Scott told The Tribune.
With a crowd that size, which far outnumbered the number of police officers on duty, comes the risk for major problems.
Fortunately, this year’s neighborhood festivities never came close to getting out of hand.
That’s because in recent years under Scott’s leadership, the agency has changed its approach to managing large crowds, particularly a street party like St. Fratty’s Day.
It’s a mindset that applies throughout the Police Department now, Scott said.
Like a doctor taking the Hippocratic Oath, he said, he wants his officers to take a “least harm” approach to their work.
“What it means is when you go out on a call — whether it’s one-on-one call for someone drinking in public or it’s a mass event like 7,000 people in our neighborhood — are your actions going to make this better or is it going to make this worse?” Scott said.
So in a situation like St. Fratty’s Day, rather than try to contain the crowd in an aggressive way, officers in their regular uniforms worked the edges, mingling with students and responding to incidents as they came up while focusing on positive interactions and outcomes and looking to defuse any potential conflicts.
“We did our best to mitigate it and ensure that it didn’t grow and ended safely,” he said.
SLO police deploy 4 nights of maximum staffing
The department was prepared for the weekend’s festivities.
Scott said increased staffing began on Thursday, and the agency deployed “maximum staffing” — or all personnel that were physically available — from Friday through Sunday.
On Saturday morning, which was when the St. Fratty’s Day party occurred, the agency deployed 120 officers from a variety of partner agencies.
Scott said his goal was to prioritize safety by having officers look for “inflection points” — or instances in the crowd that had a potential to escalate — and respond accordingly.
“The plan was to have more contact this year,” Scott said. “The plan was to move away from containment and have teams that can insert and impact the event, which we did very successfully.”
Scott said the agency sent in teams earlier this year, even though the event started about an hour later than last year. So officers were able to prevent people from bringing alcohol into the area, pour it out and cite them right as they arrived.
The agency also used a drone to monitor the crowd, which helped them respond and stop vehicle vandalism before it could spark a riot. In total, the chief said, three cars were damaged.
“We paid very close attention again to kind of monitor what I refer to as the temperature of the crowd. Are people there having a good time?” Scott said. “That’s good from a peace standpoint. Are people becoming angry or are there fights erupting in the crowd or is there mass vandalism or things being caught on fire? Those are really strong indicators that this is a highly dangerous situation.”
When several students began climbing onto the roof of a home, a team of officers navigated the crowd and got the revelers down before anyone was hurt, as happened in 2015 when a garage collapsed under the weight of a large group of partiers.
In total, police issued 189 citations and made 12 arrests during the event, Scott said.
The majority of the citations were what you’d typically expect from an unsanctioned party, such as minor in possession of alcohol, urinating in public, and noise citations. All fines were doubled for the weekend, costing violaters up to $1,000, which Scott said will hopefully be a deterrent for anyone considering returning next year.
The arrests, Scott said, were all alcohol-related, and anyone who was so inebriated they couldn’t care for themselves was taken into custody so they could sober up in a safe environment.
According to early estimates, Scott said, the event cost San Luis Obispo taxpayers approximately $50,000 — most of which were attributed the additional personnel costs.
Despite the larger crowd, Scott said, the actual event was much shorter than the year prior.
This year, the festivities began to ramp up at around 6:25 a.m. and ended at around 10 a.m., while the year prior began around 5:30 a.m. and didn’t finally wind down until noon.
What happens to St. Fratty’s Day next year?
Despite the department’s success in managing the crowd, Scott made it clear that the St. Fratty’s Day turnout couldn’t continue to increase.
He made that point clear in a presentation to the City Council immediately after the event.
“It has reached a point where it cannot be permitted to continue to grow,” he said then. “We have done our best with the resources we have available to contain it, but I think our strategy looking forward shall not be on containment. It shall be on prevention.”
One key factor will be a concerted effort to discourage out-of-towners from coming to party in San Luis Obispo.
“Don’t come to our community,” he told the council. “Don’t come to celebrate this event in our community with the intent of causing harm to our communities.”
Moving forward in the coming year, Scott said in his interview with The Tribune, the Police Department will work with city administration, Cal Poly and student leaders on ways to prevent the party from continuing to grow.
“We’re leaning on the student body. I know Cal Poly leadership has very innovative ideas that they’ll be working on with the students to make this not the place to be,” Scott said. “It has to be student-led. Us telling them not to show up is probably not going to have the impact that we want or Cal Poly leadership telling them not to do it’s not going to have the impact. It must come from the student body themselves.”
Though it’s early, the student buy-in is promising, Scott said, noting that students, including Greek affiliates, are already advocating for St. Fratty’s not to return next year.
This story was originally published April 2, 2024 at 5:20 PM.
