OSU officer injured in post-game melee goes home
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- NBC4 Investigates is getting the latest on the Ohio State University police officer who was injured during Saturday's game between the Buckeyes and Michigan that ended in a brawl after the game.
Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 9 President Brian Steel said the officer suffered a very serious head injury and is an Ohio State University Police Department veteran. He was released from the hospital on Sunday and will be off from work for a couple of weeks.
The injury happened when players on both teams started fighting. Officers representing both Ohio and Michigan ended up using pepper spray to break it up.
"One of the biggest things we expect is something like the goalpost being taken down, something like that,” Steel said. “A full out fight, assaults that took place is something a little out of the realm for us. It was an outlier.”
NBC4 Investigates looked through the general orders that outline when OSU police can and cannot use pepper spray. OSU said the general orders "...outlines the procedures/use of a chemical agent like pepper spray. It is important to note that these are the OSUPD General Orders. There were other agencies at the game and on the field as well from central Ohio and Michigan.” Their general orders can differ.
Those rules state that pepper spray can be deployed "when it is objectively reasonable" to overcome someone resisting arrest, to defend police personnel or another person from an attack or imminent attack that may result in physical harm.
The orders also said pepper spray shall not be used to disperse protestors when they are nonviolent protestors mixed in with people using or threatening physical harm to others.
"There's no playbook in here,” Steel said. “You can't determine what's going to happen. You have to make split-second decisions. I guarantee no officer going in there thought there was going to be a full-blown fight in the middle of that field.”
Ohio State said a spokesperson was unavailable on Monday, but did send a copy of the school’s pepper spray deployment policy, which can be seen below.