ROANOKE, Va. – At least 1,000 law enforcement officers, including members of the Charlottesville Police Department, the Virginia State Police and the National Guard, were in Charlottesville over the weekend
WSLS 10 spoke with Radford University criminal justice professor Dr. Tod Burke to get some perspective on what police are doing to keep everyone safe.
"At this point, it's community safety. You're trying to do what you can to help the community and at the same time, you want to maintain people's rights you know, their freedom of speech, their freedom of assembly so they're drawing that fine line to a certain point and then once, if it does get out of control, then you do have to shut it down. Again you're getting to, it's community safety, and that's the number one concern," Burke said.
Burke said much of the problem didn’t come from locals.
"Law enforcement has a difficult enough time trying to say look we're going to do crowd control and we're going to allow these activities to occur within this particular area ‘cause we anticipate the number of people that are going to be there. The difficulty is when it expands outside those boundaries and you have people coming in from different counties, even different states to add to the mix and that makes law enforcement situation a little bit more difficult," Burke said.