Taxpayers were hit with a $75,000 bill to protect attendees at a University of Washington speaking event by Milo Yiannopoulos from protesters outside.
Gangs of masked protestors, including many self-styled “Antifa” activists, gathered outside the venue where Yiannopoulos was due to address college Republicans in January.
A total of 124 police officers were called in to manage the event, which saw bricks and paint hurled by rival groups – and ended in a man being shot.
According to a new report by the Seattle Times, the huge scale of opposition to Yiannopoulos’s talk also came at a huge financial cost.
Police officers from campus and city law enforcement ended up working around 1,000 hours of overtime between them.
The Times estimated that the cost to local taxpayers for a single event like this was far in excess of traditional flashpoints like college football games, and in roughly the same ballpark as a visit by the President of the United States.
The University of Washington College Republicans raised about $9,000 in connection to the event, which they gave to the university to help cover costs.
As Heat Street previously reported, Yiannopoulos did not charge a fee for speaking – but even so, the event left a large black hole in university finances.
The chaos on campus was repeated on a larger scale less than two weeks later, when opposition to a Yiannopoulos speech at the University of California, Berkeley, developed into a full-blown riot.