With the winter season coming up, the time is approaching for students to enjoy the snow and engage in outdoor recreational activities including skiing, sledding, ice-skating and snowball fights. With the seasonal activities that winter brings, there may also be serious consequences.

What seems to be fun and games may end up turning into a case of damaged properties or injuries. Although they do not often occur at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, the Platteville Police Department takes these types of reports seriously.

“Typically we do not see issues on a yearly basis due to snowball fights. What is more likely is if you’ll have somebody pick up a snowball or a piece of ice and cause damage to a window such as a vehicle or store window,” Chief of Police Doug McKinley said. “We would typically write a ticket if we caught the perpetrator for disorderly conduct or criminal damage property, and that would be $263.50 along with any restitution for any damage caused.”

The Platteville Police Department is primarily interested in instances where the snowballs cause damage to property or injuries.  The rules for snowball throwing are the same for campuses and universities across the state.

“Wisconsin is one of two states in the entire United States that has our University Policies tied right into state law so these aren’t just Platteville policies, they are state of Wisconsin policies set by the legislature. So these are two of the codes that we operate under and one of them is Chapter 18,” Assistant Dean of Students Katherine Demerse said.

Under Chapter 18, every university in the UW System is restricted from a wide variety of offenses against public safety, which include “throwing hard objects.” Among the listed objects are snowballs.

“I know that sometimes campuses do programs where they have sanctioned snowball fights. I think those are going away more and more because they can cause injury. In those cases they are going to have students sign a liability waiver so that if somebody is injured, the university is not at any fault for those injuries,” Demerse said.

In order to combat injuries or damages due to snowball throwing, Residence Life sent an email to students living in the residence halls, going over the guidelines and make students aware of the potential dangers and fees.

“It’s never really been a problem that I have seen and maybe that’s a reason the policy is important. I think the problem with this is that some people don’t know what the actual policy is the reason we have it is for other people’s protection. If we as RAs see this happening, we are the reporters and have to take it to the next step,” Ian Dorsch Brockert Hall resident assistant said.

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