Cardin town hall: About those police officers …
If you followed my live blogging of Sen. Ben Cardin’s town hall meeting on health care on Twitter last night or read coverage in The Baltimore Sun this morning, you may have noticed a mention of Towson University police.
About 10 minutes into the meeting, about a half-dozen university police officers made their way down the two aisles of the Harold J. Kaplan Concert Hall and took up positions briefly in front of the stage. The crowd was boisterous at times, with some people interrupting Cardin, but nothing that would give the impression that physical confrontation was imminent.
I didn’t mention the incident in my story this morning after speaking to university officials last night, and given the fact that there were no confrontations and no one in the audience was threatened with being removed.
In the end, officers were there in response to an abundance of caution stemming from a simple misunderstanding, university officials said.
Here’s what Jennifer Gajewski, TU’s assistant to the president for governmental affairs, said after the meeting.
Gajewski said someone spotted a person in a balcony area that houses an organ, above and behind where the audience sits in the concert hall.
“They didn’t know how he got up there,” Gajewski said.
It was pretty quickly determined that the person in the balcony area (which is not open to public seating) was a technician who worked for the university, and not someone who posed a threat.
Most of the officers disappeared through two side doors almost as quickly as they appeared.