Police officers at the University of Wisconsin’s football game this weekend against Penn State University went beyond their normal crowd control duty. The men in blue ejected 61 UW students and 90 fans overall at the game while issuing 30 citations, primarily for underage drinking. These numbers are higher than typical infraction numbers for a morning football game, although they are not particularly high for a game held after dusk.

While UW students may have been rowdier and more intoxicated at this weekend’s game — primarily because the late start time of 4:45 p.m. gave students ample time to drink and visit bars — police were overzealous in kicking students out of Camp Randall. Anecdotal reports from the game indicate that students were ejected for tripping or not standing on the bleachers during the game, which police officers obviously used as indicators that students were “too drunk” to stay in the stadium. Many students complained that while they were no more intoxicated than at a usual game, police officers were watching students more closely and kicked students out of the game for less serious infractions than normal.

Officers need to realize that some students will indeed drink more and thus be more intoxicated when the starting time for the game is moved back several hours. However, if officers are going into these late-start games with the attitude and expectation that they will need to eject more students and enforce more crowd-control measures, many students will go into these same games more irritated and defensive — neither of which combine well with alcohol. Moreover, there is no way officers are capable of ejecting every student who commits an infraction. Instead, it is more like shooting fish in a barrel, and the students who do get ejected are most often more unlucky than unlawful.

If students are breaking the rules that apply to any normal game day — or causing any kind of physical harm to or endangering anyone else — by all means, they should be thrown out. But ejecting students with little reason beyond them appearing “too drunk” does nothing but incite anger and frustration toward the police department. Students pay to go to these games and many enjoy drinking beforehand. This is yet another situation in which police need to work with students in a calm, commonsense manner so that both sides get what they ultimately want — a fun and safe game day atmosphere.