UK, Lexington PD team up to tamp down on large student gatherings. Did it work?
Lexington police on bicycles, motorcycles and police cars patrolled off-campus student neighborhoods during Saturday’s first University of Kentucky home football game as part of a new effort to tamp down on large student gatherings off campus as the number of coronavirus cases statewide continues to rise.
Jay Blanton, a spokesman for UK, said shortly before 6 p.m. Saturday only one incident had been reported to UK police but further details about that incident were not immediately available Saturday.
Lexington Police Department had only three noise or large party complaints prior to 7 p.m., Lexington police officials said.
That’s way down compared to the 33 phone calls the department received last weekend and the weekend prior. Some of those complaints were for the same location, police have previously said.
Students still gathered outdoors prior to the UK game against Ole Miss in areas around Maxwell Street and in the State Street and Waller Avenue area. But most of those gatherings appeared to be small with fewer than a half dozen people.
A week earlier scores of UK students attended house parties in the Elizabeth Street area prior and during UK’s first football game, prompting complaints from residents in that area.
Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton and UK President Eli Capilouto announced Thursday Lexington police would assist UK Police and the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department to monitor large, off-campus parties in an effort to stop the spread of the highly contagious respiratory illness.
“This new collaboration among UK, Lexington-Fayette County Health Department, and the city will focus on reducing the spread of COVID-19 within our community,” Gorton said earlier this week. “ We are working together in a way we’ve never done before.”
UK police officers on patrol will only be able to enforce the university’s student code of conduct since they lack jurisdiction off-campus. Lexington police officers can issue citations for city ordinance violations — such as noise violations.
Guidelines requiring students to avoid non-sanctioned large groups and parties have been added to the university’s code of conduct this year. The code applies to students both on- and off-campus.
Students can face penalties ranging from a warning all the way up to suspension or expulsion for violating the code of conduct. Punishments are typically dependent on specific circumstances, university spokespeople have said previously.
Residents in the neighborhoods surrounding campus have reported occurrences of house parties and have been critical of the university’s regulation of off-campus students.
Roughly 24 percent of all COVID-19 cases in Fayette County are UK students. UK has stressed data gathered from its 50-person contact tracing team shows infections on-campus have not contributed to community spread across Fayette County. But the number of cases at UK is also contributing to a higher incidence rate in the county.
Citing case data, Fayette County Public Schools will not decided until early November whether more students will return to in-person learning. The school system decided last week that students who need special or targeted services would begin to return to school for in-person learning in mid-October.
