University of Kentucky, Lexington police will jointly patrol for student parties this weekend
Both the Lexington and the University of Kentucky police departments will begin joint patrols of near-campus neighborhoods for large student gatherings that may spread COVID-19, university and city officials said in a joint press release Thursday.
The patrols will begin Friday, and UK police will have the authority to intervene in student groups not abiding by the university’s social distancing guidelines, the release from the mayor’s office said . 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.
The joint patrols come just ahead of UK’s first home football game on Saturday. College football season is traditionally a time for students to gather, and last week’s season-opening game brought students out in droves in near-campus neighborhoods, drawing the ire of neighbors.
The patrols are generally planned to continue beyond this weekend, and officials will assess this weekend’s results “to see what the long term plan will look like,” said city spokesperson Craig Cammack.
When asked what specific student housing areas will be covered by the patrols, Cammack said that the Lexington Police Department was “unable to provide specific housing areas.” The press release simply stated that police will patrol “off-campus student housing areas.”
“Everyone involved in this partnership is concerned about public health and safety in Lexington,” Mayor Linda Gorton said in the release. “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. We are working together in a way we’ve never done before. The university has been a leader among higher education in taking proactive COVID-19 measures for their students, and adding this additional collaboration makes those measures even stronger.”
UK police officers on patrol will only be able to enforce the university’s student code of conduct since they lack jurisdiction off-campus, UK spokesperson Jay Blanton said. Lexington police officers were be on the look out for law and ordinance violations.
Previously, the university was reliant on reports of parties from Lexington police and neighbors. Lexington police were not specifically looking for parties but were responsive to noise complaints called in by neighbors.
Last weekend, the Lexington Police Department received 33 calls complaining about loud parties — the same amount of calls as the weekend prior, spokesperson Brenna Angel said. Some of those calls were about the same location and some may have come from locations not near campus.
Mark Swanson, the Councilman for Lexington’s 3rd District — which envelopes the UK campus — and is also an associate professor in UK’s College of Public Health, said he saw maskless groups of 20 to 30-person gatherings in the heavily student populated neighborhoods which flank Waller Avenue last weekend.
“They were moving from party to party to party and I didn’t see a single mask,” Swanson told the Herald-Leader earlier this week. “What that tells me is that the university is getting students to wear masks and socially distance on campus but those lessons aren’t being carried over to off campus.”
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. At the end of last week, Gov. Andy Beshear and the head of Fayette County Public Schools said that UK’s student cases are making it less likely that the school district will be able to return to in-person learning.
UK has stressed that the data gathered front their 50-person contact tracing team shows that infections on-campus have not contributed to community spread across Fayette County.
Of the approximately 4,000 COVID-19 exposures — generally defined as individuals who have been within six feet on an infected person for more than 15 minutes — that have been recorded by UK’s contact tracing team since its mid-August start, only 5.5 percent have been individuals who are not either a UK employee or student, Blanton said earlier this week. Meaning that most of the exposures to the disease stay within the university system.
This story was originally published October 1, 2020 at 3:35 PM.