by Katie Kenerly
To be quite honest, I’m not entirely sure why I should even be writing this article in the first place. I mean, seriously? Who throws a beer at another person, let alone a police officer? I’m going to drop a truth bomb on all of y’all right now: WE ARE ADULTS!
Well, at least legally if not mentally. The point is, though, that we should know better by now. Hell, we should have known better by the time we were three. And yet here I am, writing an article about how it’s bad to throw beer at cops because someone actually did it.
Okay, I get it—everyone does stupid things sometimes, especially when they’re drunk, but this is unacceptable on so many levels. I, for one, wouldn’t appreciate it if someone threw a beer at me at a party, and I would be especially angry if someone threw a beer at me while I was doing my job of protecting them.
I am from Athens, Georgia, which, in recent years (and especially following Georgia’s former label as the #1 party school in America), has become somewhat of a police state. That may sound like an exaggeration, but I can promise you that it is not. I have heard numerous horror stories, both from parents and UGA students, about the police giving out MIPs like they’re parking tickets. Seriously, an absurd number of my friends have gotten them. Let’s be honest—no one at Sewanee is very good at discretion when intoxicated, and we’re intoxicated a lot.
And yet, surprisingly few of us have received MIPs. Why on Earth could that be? Oh yeah, maybe it’s because our cops are great. They know when we’re drunk at parties, but they’re not looking to bust us; they just want us to be safe. They’ll even drive you back to your dorm if you’re drunk and feel unsafe. I tell this to my friends at different schools and the thought alone baffles them. They could never even imagine getting a ride from, or even interacting with, the police at their school while drunk without getting in trouble, but it is almost second nature to us. So what I’m getting at, y’all, is that we have some really great men and women in the Sewanee Police Department, and the least we can do is respect them enough to let them do their jobs without living in constant fear of having beer lobbed at them.
The other day I noticed that the side of the Sewanee Police cars says “To Protect and Serve,” and that is truly what they do. Although they do give out an absurd amount of parking tickets, they’re honestly not looking to get you in trouble when you’re drunk—they just want you to be safe. So please, don’t make me write this article again.