Police in Tucson donned riot gear Saturday night to deal with crowds of people who watched a live feed of UA basketball lose to Wisconsin in the NCAA tournament.
The result: Fifteen people were arrested -- nine of whom are UA students -- while police used several crowd-control devices, and a video has surfaced of a woman getting a blindsided shove from a police officer.
According to a statement from the Tucson PD, officers from Tucson and UA police departments asked people to move out of the streets from Main Gate Square -- a district with bars and restaurants that abuts the UA campus.
According to the Tucson PD statement:
The majority of the crowd did not respond to the dispersal order and began throwing beer bottles, beer cans, and firecrackers at the officers. Several firecrackers rolled underneath a patrol vehicle deployed with the Mobile Field Force Units. As the crowd began to move closer to the officers, pepper ball rounds were used in an attempt to disperse the crowd. Several individuals continued to advance at the officers and were taken into custody.Fifteen people were arrested, and three of those people sustained "minor injuries" during their arrests, according to the Tucson PD statement.
Tucson PD reports using four foam baton rounds, two other non-lethal rounds, nine aerosol pepper-spray vapor canisters, and 200 pepper-spray rounds.
"At this time it appears no officers were injured during the incident and the only damage reported was a street sign that had been knocked over," the statement says.
Meanwhile, video has surfaced of a woman getting blindsided by an officer during all of this. She appears in the video only for a second or two before being taken to the ground, but she and another person appear to just be casually walking toward the crowd she's shoved hard onto a bench.
Tucson PD didn't immediately respond to New Times' request for comment this morning, but the local paper of record, the Arizona Daily Star, reports that TPD's internal affairs division is reviewing the video.
UPDATE 9:37 a.m.: Here's a video that shows some of what was going on between police and UA fans:
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