It started off as a familiar scene. Thousands of college football fans were tailgating outside the Citrus Bowl last year before Saturday’s game between Marshall and the University of Central Florida.

But the drinking, the grilling and the celebrating ended tragically when an undercover UCF campus police officer was mistakenly shot and killed by a member of the Orlando Police Department.

Newspaper reports said Officer Mario Jenkins was working undercover in attempts to stop underage drinking at pregame parties outside the stadium at the UCF game. Jenkins ran into resistance when trying to break up a tailgate party, which is when he allegedly fired three shots into the air. Having seen a man in street clothes firing a weapon, the Orlando police officer fired three fatal shots at Jenkins.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement launched an investigation into the shooting and is interviewing more than 50 eyewitnesses in attempt to uncover the exact events.

Collaboration between Campus Police Divisions and local police departments is nothing new and locally it has become routine for the university police department to work with Bowling Green city police to cover various events.

Patrolling this weekend’s homecoming games and festivities at BGSU will be no different. The influx of people in town for the game, the tailgating and the concert will undoubtedly require additional police officers from both the city and the University. However, both departments are confident there will be no tragedies similar to the one in Orlando.

While neither department plans on utilizing undercover officers for this week’s game, they realize the importance of staying on the same page.

“Working any kind of joint operation, where we’d both be working concurrently, we would definitely know that they had undercover operatives and they would know that we had undercover operatives,” said Brad Biller, administrative lieutenant for the BGPD.

“The people that actually work the road are familiar enough with them and they’re familiar enough with us that it would be very unlikely that something like this would happen.”

With a smaller town and a smaller venue to patrol, the on-campus police department agrees that an unfortunate event similar to the one in Orlando is very improbable.

“In almost every situation we have officers in uniform. We don’t do plain clothes officers,” said University Chief of Police James Wiegand. “Maybe in special circumstances we may, but in that particular situation, everyone would be made aware of that.”

Both departments said keeping an open line of communication is imperative to patrolling major events.

“If we’re at one of their events, say a football game-we’ll attend their role call. So we’ll actually be at that briefing before that event,” Lt. Biller said. “There’s no question that the more communications, the better-We try very hard to stay on top of those things here, and I think that we have a pretty good communications set up with the University.”

Working together during this weekend’s festivities, both departments will be dependent on each other to keep themselves – as well as the general public – safe, but they realize it’s not easy.

“Police work is dangerous,” Wiegand said. “Unfortunately there are infrequent situations like that that do occur.”

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