Militarized Cops Use Pepper Spray, Tear Gas on Celebrating Ohio State Students

Thousands of fans celebrating Ohio State's National Championship football victory take over High St in Columbus, Ohio, are repelled by police using tear gas and pepper spray. Columbus Dispatch video by Doral Chenoweth III





Ohio State and Columbus police, including a SWAT team, indiscriminately used pepper spray and tearYoutube/Columbus Dispatch gas on students who refused to leave the streets after celebrating the Buckeyes' latest college football championship.

NBC News reports that a crowd of about 8,000 descended on Ohio State's football stadium and tore down the goal post, a tradition as old as college football itself and not exactly cause for panic. According to theColumbus Dispatch, the most serious incidents of the evening were scattered reports of fires:

There were more than 40 reports of fires – most of them in Dumpsters – in the hour after the Buckeyes’ victory. Most were concentrated between 12th and 17th avenues, between N. High and Summit streets.

In at least three cases, couches were reported to be set afire. According to radio traffic, in at least one case, other students helped the Fire Division and used a fire extinguisher on a couch. There also were about a dozen calls on trash fires in the campus area. No fire was reported to be serious.

Courtesy of the Dispatch, the video below shows law enforcement, some clad in riot gear, casually walking through the crowd spraying anyone in their path, including young women. They also opened at least three tear gas canisters. At around the the 0:33 mark, two officers can be seen shaking their pepper spray cans and unloading them directly in the faces of students standing on the sidewalk, including the unlucky individual holding the camera. 

Three couch fires, an indeterminate number of dumpster fires, mostly within a five block vicinity, and a torn down goalpoast. That's what it took to bring out armored vehicles andpotentially deadly instruments of war.