No silver bullet for student drinking

By Nick Grabbe
Staff Writer

Published on September 14, 2007

The Amherst Police Department is bracing for another busy weekend, as students experimenting with alcohol drive their cars, disturb neighbors and assemble in large crowds late at night.

Last weekend, the first of the new semester, with warm weather encouraging outdoor rowdiness, it took police up to two hours to respond to all the noise complaints.

Officers went to Townhouse Apartments and confronted 700 young people throwing bottles and rocks. They had to deal with a crowd of 150 at Hampshire College, parties of 60 people at the Boulders and 30 on Fearing Street, and a fake report of a stabbing at Ann Whalen Apartments.

In all, there were 25 alcohol-related arrests over the weekend, but there could have been a lot more, if officers had not had so many disturbances to deal with, said Police Chief Charles Scherpa.

This weekend, there's the added wrinkle of a Red Sox-Yankee series, the chief said. Contentious sports events have triggered disturbances in the past, and last month there was bad blood between the teams because pitchers were throwing at hitters.

Once again, there will be a full complement of officers on duty, and those whose shifts end at midnight will probably be asked to remain until 3 or 4 a.m. But police officers can only contain the problem, not solve it, Scherpa said.

"Throwing police at a situation doesn't do anything," he said in an interview.

"It solves it for the moment. The problem is the transient population. There's a new group every September that has to be re-educated."

Scherpa said he is concerned about officers working 12-to-14-hour shifts three nights in a row, weekend after weekend. Town officials are also concerned about the cost to taxpayers.

"It takes a toll on them and their families," he said.

"I'm worried about morale and burnout, and I don't want them looking for a positions where they can make more money for less work. This is a high-stress community to work six to eight months

a year."

The Police Department is receiving more cooperation from University of Massachusetts officials than ever before, Scherpa said.

But the highly-touted "mutual aid agreement" merely formalized the relationship between the town and campus police and doesn't put more officers on the street, he said.

Made aware from outset

At UMass, incoming students must take an alcohol education program, and town and campus officials meet every Monday to discuss the previous weekend, said Martha Nelson Patrick, the director of community relations. A joint committee on reducing high-risk drinking meets monthly, and she tries to encourage students, landlords and neighbors to talk to each other, she said.

"But there's no silver bullet here," she said. "We just need to keep working together and raise the bar."

Last September, she put up signs on Sunset Avenue reminding students that they were entering a residential neighborhood where a child might be sleeping, said Nelson Patrick. But the signs were stolen.

This fall, posters in buses detail state and local laws, she said. And campus officials will talk with alcohol retailers about the messages they send in their advertising, in a program similar to ones at Fitchburg State College and SUNY-Albany, she said.

Select Board Chairman Gerry Weiss is intrigued by a strategy used in Burlington, Vt.

"Apparently, they have a community location where they bring the offending students and the families they have upset and hold a dialogue, so that there is a human face on what the consequences were of the student's actions," he said.

The bottom line is that it's very difficult to regulate behavior and values, especially with limited resources, said Town Manager Laurence Shaffer.

"The strategy that seems to work the best is to identify the worst offenders and to aggressively regulate," he said. "The problem with that is that you can simply move the undesirable behavior to another location."

Last weekend, a police cruiser was stationed in front of Alpha Epsilon Pi on Sunset Avenue, in response to neighbors' complaints about noise (fraternity members claim they have been singled out and harassed). None of last weekend's noise complaints came from Sunset Avenue.

Reporter Chad Cain contributed information for this story.