MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — As far as the end of October goes, Morgantown’s Chief of Police can now breathe a little easier.
“Most of us worked doubles on Saturday,” Preston said Tuesday on Morgantown AM. “That was from me all the way down to the newest recruit. Everyone worked doubles.”
Between the start of Halloween Weekend, which Preston said his department views as Thursday through Saturday, the MoHawk Bowl, WVU football, Mountaineer Week concluding with a pick-up WVU basketball game for charity, and the overall attraction of night life during the course of those days, Morgantown can become a much more lively place.
And liven up it did: Preston said his department needed to intervene when a house party became a full street party in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Morgantown.
“That got under control relatively quickly,” Preston said.
Though, he said, it wasn’t for lack of trying by party goers.
“It started out as a party, then it became a street party, and then it became people throwing rocks and bottles and just being really dangerous, which resulted in us having to intervene,” Preston said.
That event was broken up through the use of non-lethal crowd control.
“We ended up having to use chemical munitions, about 50 pepper balls and three canisters of CS gas.”
Though there was still some activity on Halloween night, which fell on a Tuesday this year, Preston described the overall police response to activity as “middle of the road.”
“Things that we typically see,” he said. “People climbing on the roofs, people throwing stuff from the tops of balconies, roof diving — where they are jumping off roofs into crowds of people. Very obviously, that kind of stuff is going to get us to intervene.”