-An Op-Ed piece by Minvera Doodle
Today’s inauguration was, mostly, handled with aplomb and professionalism. The police had a checkpoint at the front of the parking lot, where they did a bomb check under the vehicles to keep our citizens safe. They made sure to tell everyone to leave their weapons in their cars, and checked people as they entered the front of the venue. A man was, allegedly, turned away for having rolling papers in his pocket.
There was plenty of security around the edges of the event and the police stayed between the crowd and the stage. All of this is well and good, but there was still a glaring oversight during this process. There did not appear to be any protocol for how to handle hecklers, outside of ignoring them and allowing them to disrupt the event for everyone else in attendance.
One particularly awful heckler was sitting directly in front of the press booth and talked loudly through the entire ceremony. A ceremony that was quite auspicious and should have been treated with a great deal of respect. Even after a Weazel news employee complained about him directly to two officers (one of whom was a detective), and gave the hecklers location description and surname, there did not appear to be any action taken.
Aside from this and a minor fender bender in the parking lot, there were no other incidents. All in all, the police did a fantastic job keeping the venue and the people therein safe, though they really could have done more to police the crowd itself.
