The first night of Halloween weekend at the University of Victoria appears to have come and gone without the furor of previous years with only one person arrested on Friday night for public intoxication.
Saanich police Det.-Sgt. Damien Kowalewich said patrols on Friday night were a success. “A lot of alcohol was poured out on scene.”
There were several hundred “generally good-natured” students gathering at different parts of the Gordon Head campus, he said.
A B.C. Emergency Health Services spokesperson said that paramedics received five calls about intoxication from the campus on Friday night.
Halloween weekend antics in the past two years have seen fights, fireworks and general drunken revelry.
While fireworks were heard on campus early Saturday, none appeared to have been shot into crowds; that happened on the Halloween weekend of 2021, the first year that student residences operated at full capacity since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
About 50 vehicles filled with off-campus students were denied access to the campus on Friday night and several non-students were removed from campus premises under the provisions of the Trespass Act, Kowalewich said.
In a bid to limit the size of the parties, UVic is not allowing off-campus guests in student residences from Oct. 27 to 31.
UVic began limiting the number of guests in student residence apartments and townhouses in 2019. The townhouse residences built in 1994 have floor joists sensitive to “rhythmic activities” such as dancing and jumping, according to a report by engineering firm Read Jones Christoffersen.
The report recommended a maximum limit of 16 persons per cluster residence; that limit became university residence policy in 2021.
Cluster residences often served in the past as the nexus of on-campus parties with close to a hundred people crammed into a single unit for a party.
Alex Kierstead, who went to high school in Victoria and studied at UVic, said campus was known as “the place to go” for Halloween for many years.
Kierstead, who now works as an educator with Good Night Out Victoria, a non-profit that advocates for safer nightlife in the city, said the Halloween weekend falls in the “red zone” of the first eight weeks of fall semester where sexual assaults are more likely to take place.
To help prevent that and to make sure everyone has a good time, the organization worked with the undergraduate student union to set up a booth on campus on Halloween weekend. Outreach workers in bright pink hoodies were on campus until 1 a.m. on Saturday, providing information about safe sex and harm reduction to students.
“There’s sometimes peer pressure and they haven’t necessarily had a chance to build up those skills yet,” Kierstead said.
Students have been “super welcoming” of the resource, she said, adding that the outreach team will also be working Saturday night.
Police will continue to maintain a presence on campus during the weekend.
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