This past weekend marked the annual Unofficial celebration on campus, and with it came an influx of visitors from outside of the UIUC community. There was also a notable three arrests for DUI’s over the course of the weekend.

“Obviously this weekend we had some visitors in our campus for Unofficial St. Patrick’s Day,” said Patrick Wade, communications specialist for the UIPD. “I think that the correlation (of increase in DUI’s) is there because there was an increase in officers on the street and a lot of people coming into the community.”

Wade said that the amount of DUI’s this past weekend was not an overwhelming amount, and that there are peaks varying from weekend to weekend.

“We handled it how we always do. Every weekend, we have people who choose to drink and drive, and every week we have officers who look for people making bad decisions like that,” said Wade. “We intervene when appropriate. Officers are prepared to deal with that.”

The arrest made at around noon on Friday was of an individual from Cicero, and two individuals from Chicago were arrested in the 3 am hours on Saturday and Sunday respectively. None of the recipients of DUI’s from the past weekend were University students.

“It’s notable that none of the people in the police report for [Monday] were U of I students. That’s another reflection of why we take so many steps to discourage people outside of the community to come here to party on Unofficial,” said Wade. “Generally our students know the rules and follow them and respect them. We see problems from people who come here for that day to drink alcohol and cause chaos. Our students were fairly respectful and we were pleased to see that.”

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