Last week, a subcommittee of the powerful Alcohol License Review Committee released a report that seeks to deal with \comprehensive alcohol issues"" in downtown Madison. A proposal contained within the plan seeks to ban drink specials after 8 p.m., which, the report concedes, will probably drive college-age drinkers from the downtown bar area to unregulated, unsupervised and potentially dangerous house parties.
The vague language goes on to say that if this alcohol exodus occurs, ""heightened attention to address improper activities at those parties"" may be necessary.
This heightened attention is reminiscent of Madison about five years ago, when chronically misguided local authorities sought to deal with the alleged dangers of college drinking with a plan'and moreover a debacle'called Operation Sting.
Operation Sting was, in a word, a disaster. The Madison Police Department, with the blessing of Mayor Sue Bauman, used state transportation funds earmarked to prevent drunken driving to bust college house parties. To be more specific, the city paid officers overtime to dress like students, slip into parties and fine both the patrons and the hosts.
And we're not talking chump change here. For example, over the weekend of Sept. 5-7, 1997, the two student newspapers reported that two busted parties yielded 38 citations. The fines could ultimately have totaled $25,000, even a fraction of which could force many students to drop out of school to pay off.
Mayor Bauman thankfully killed the program in November 1997, though it was reincarnated in a different iteration the next year. In 1998, the ""Party Patrol,"" as it was called, was paid for out of police overtime coffers'funds that we are sure are more scarce now than they were then. The new ""Palmer Report,"" named after its primary advocate, Ald. Kent Palmer, District 15, vaguely refers to soliciting ""public and private resources"" to pay for the monitoring of these house parties.
We see a number of problems with placing police and students in an adversarial relationship. Patrolling parties will take officers away from answering service calls, which is their primary function. In truth, the police didn't even like Operation Sting, and they said as much publicly. Moreover, every governmental body in the state is going through an extremely lean period. There is no way a local leader could justify using overtime funds to pay officers to patrol parties when real crime occurs elsewhere.
We hope the proponents of this new plan use history as a model when dealing with the alleged dangers of college drinking. Operation Sting was a bad idea then, and its reincarnation would be a bad idea now.
