Dartblog

Eighth in a series; read the first here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here and the seventh here.

We’ve been writing about the simple fact that Dartmouth students don’t need—but certainly have—the experience of getting arrested just for getting drunk. We’ve already discovered that this is a part of the Dartmouth experience that the administration and local police have elected to create. Dartblog has long endorsed the old fashioned method of policing: a cop should drive you home, if he needs to; he shouldn’t arrest you for having one too many Keystones. Likewise S&S, which should exercise some patrol ownership over the College.

It’s all a matter of discretion.

Hanover Police Chief Giaccone, one of this page’s illustrious readers, directed me yesterday to the heavy enforcement of the underage drinking laws in Burlington as evidence that these laws are enforced in Vermont — in response to my recent research showing that in the town of Middlebury, the police and Middlebury’s Public Safety force turn a blind eye to underage drinking by students.

Let’s turn to the Clery Report stats again to compare the enforcement experience at Middlebury and at UVM:

In the 2005-2007 period, Middlebury had no police arrests at all for liquor law violations, and it has 58 disciplinary violations for alcohol.

In the same period, UVM reported 23 arrests for alcohol, and disciplinary violations for alcohol totaled 2,667. (This is not a typo. You can look it up yourself.)

UVM has 12,800 students and Middlebury has 2,455. Running the numbers, we can see that UVM is a little more than five times as large as Middlebury, but it had 46 times as many alcohol violations over the three-year period. That means that UVM had approximately nine times as many violations per capita as Middlebury (actually the figure is probably greater than this because UVM, with its graduate and professional school population, has a smaller proportion of underage students than Middlebury).

Given that the state drinking laws are identical in both of these Vermont towns, what are the possible conclusions that we can draw from these figures?

1) UVM students drink nine times as much as Middlebury students and the level of enforcement in the two places is the same.

2) UVM students drink about as much as Middlebury students but the Burlington Police Department and UVM’s Police Services use their discretion to take a widely differing posture on enforcing these laws.

You can decide.