At a press conference in early December, the local deputy police chief of Wausau, Wisconsin, picked up a snowball and hurled it at the city’s mayor on camera. Under the city’s current law, Mayor Robert Mielke could have pressed charges.
But that’s about to change, according to Wausau officials, who are finally considering lifting a 1962 ban on snowballs. The ordinance states that “no person shall throw or shoot any object, arrow, stone, snowball or other missile or projectile, by hand or by any other means, at any other person or at, in or into any building, street, sidewalk, alley, highway, park, playground or other public place within the city.”
By throwing a snowball directly at the mayor, deputy police chief Matt Barnes tried to clarify that the ordinance isn’t meant to prohibit all snowballs, just dangerous ones.
“A fun snowball fight is a fun snowball fight, and that’s not something we enforce this ordinance with,” he explained in a video posted on the Wausau Police Department’s YouTube channel.
The police department has, in fact, issued citations to reckless snowball-throwers, Barnes said, and each time it’s because someone threw a snowball at moving cars on the road. Even so, the police department has only issued about 10 citations in the past 15 years, and only two of them involved snowballs.
Still, the Wausau City Council wants to remove the word “snowball” from the ordinance entirely, in part because of the recent national attention the ordinance has received.
“Maybe it’s worth giving a look to see if that list could be amended, to mitigate that odd news story that keeps coming up like a bad penny,” said Lisa Rasmussen, Wausau City Council president.
Sometimes, it seems, all it takes is a little bit of public pressure to put things right. The city council will meet in January to consider changing the statute to decriminalize snowball fights for good.
