‘Discretion’ will be the word of the day at next month’s Sun God Festival, when 45 police officers descend upon RIMAC Field armed with zip ties, Breathalyzers and enough probable cause to round up the majority of an expected 20,000 attendees.
Despite attempts by A.S. Programming to reduce security costs for this year’s festival, a police force as beefed up as last year will again patrol campus come May 15, though fewer officers will be present during the festival’s daytime hours.
Security alone will cost students a hefty $32,223.87, approximately 17 percent of the festival’s total operating budget. This sum will primarily pay the overtime salaries of campus police officers from UCSD, San Diego State, UC Irvine and UC Riverside.
The presence of Staff Pro guards ‘mdash; those yellow-jacketed rent-a-cops seen patrolling at many campus events ‘mdash; will increase due in part to the addition of the dance tent, a massive enclosure that will host a number of deejay acts, including top-billed headliner Girl Talk. According to Associate Vice President of Programming Garret Berg, the extra guards were necessitated by a decision to allow attendees to dance on stage during the Girl Talk performance.
Berg, who said he would like to see a smaller police presence at this year’s festival at a public Sun God planning forum during Fall Quarter, was partially able to achieve this goal by ensuring that fewer officers would be present on and around’ festival grounds during the earlier hours of the festival.
In contrast, the police force will grow at nightfall.
‘Last year, a very large percentage of the officers were there for the full festival,’ Berg said. ‘The majority of those officers coming this year are coming later in the day ‘mdash; once the sun sets, after our more mellow acts are off, kind of at more appropriate times and for fewer hours.’
Berg said the excessive number of police officers at last year’s event helped him decide to redistribute police activity throughout the day.
‘There are definitely times during the festival when it’s appropriate to have a larger police presence than at other times,’ Berg said. ‘Last year, the problem was that during the day, as people were arriving, there was this overwhelming police presence. I was seeing pictures of people getting arrested with four cops standing around them. That’s kind of what we wanted to prevent this year.’
The redistribution also allowed for a reduction in the total cost of security, though these savings were offset by a lack of grant funding for the police department. While last year UCSD police were able to cover approximately $40,000 of this total cost with the use of such grants, this year the programming department was forced to compensate for much of this cost.
‘Unfortunately the cost wasn’t able to go down because the money that we would have saved was pretty much offset by [the UC Police Department’s] lack of grant support,’ Berg said. ‘Our costs would have gone down, but without grant support, our costs went down a lot and then went back up a lot.’
According to UCSD police Lt. Dave Rose, the true cost of security for the festival will be unavailable until after the event.
Although Berg promised that no undercover police officers would be present at the event, he said his department would be unable to regulate the presence of undercover Alcoholic Beverage Control officers at campus venues outside of the festival grounds, such as Porter’s Pub.
Readers can contact Reza Farazmand at [email protected].