Dartblog

Chief of Hanover Police Nicholas Giaccone beckoned the leaders of Dartmouth’s social scene to a hasty meeting at Town Hall yesterday to lay down a fresh-born corpus of absurd alcohol enforcement policies.

The assembly did not approve, but this was a police officer talking down to twenty-somethings, and they were naturally not in a position to argue. “Don’t like it in Hanover,” Chief Giaccone said, “they can go to another Ivy League school.” Which might suggest as to motive.

Giaccone, 61, has been with Hanover Police for 36 years. This column interviewed him here. H-Po has 35 full-time equivalent employees, or one per 310 residents. That is an extremely rich ratio, especially given the pacific nature of old Hanover.

No one really understands the occasion for Chief Giaccone’s new laws; or whose idea they were; or when they’ll go into effect; or how long they’ll last. But we do know their details. Live from last evening’s grim confabulation, at whose entrance Dartmouth student IDs were checked and scanned lest a less impressionable person lurk his way into the star chamber, this page reported:

The Chief referred repeatedly to the “numbers” [relating to drinking] and stated that as a result of the figures (no details given) the following actions would be taken:

a) There would be increased compliance checks by uniformed officers to ensure that students and their social organizations were not in violation of the laws against underage drinking, the serving of alcohol to minors and the use of premises for these activities;

b) The police would be conducting alcohol stings in which underage persons employed by the police department would visit sites on the Dartmouth campus under cover in an attempt to be served alcohol (the Chief said that these people would not use fake ID’s) and report this conduct to the police for use in prosecution;

c) In addition to basic charges for underage consumption, higher charges might leveled against servers of alcohol, officers of organizations at whose venues alcohol was served, and the organizations themselves. The statute punishing the “facilitating of an underage drinking party” — a misdemeanor — would be employed against Dartmouth students; the Chief said that this statute provided for the possibility of jail time and fines of as much as $100,000/count against offending organizations.

d) Crimes that were only violations, like underage possession of alcohol, could lead to fines of as much as $20,000/count.

Hanover Police have the pleasure of earning healthy salaries to patrol a crimeless town. That town’s business is the care and feeding of its main resident and taxpayer, Dartmouth College. And that College is in turn kept aloft by 1) the hedge funds of its alumni and 2) its students and their parents.

It’s a comfy situation, all things considered. But the Hanover Police have been unjustifiably aggressive in throwing Dartmouth students into the criminal justice system for having beers in the hallowed collegiate fashion. The present proposal is to upgrade to nuclear an already incendiary level of enforcement. Chief Nicholas Giaccone wants genuine spies standing hard by the pong tables. He wants $20,000 tickets for a sink; $100,000 for filling the cups up to begin with.

Let’s recount a few facts.

1) Dartmouth students don’t drink much more than other Ivy League students, but on a per capita basis they are arrested for drinking by Hanover Police more than six times as frequently as the next-most-arrested, which are Yalies. The previous college administration was complicit in this, but the new one is not. Is this why the Chief is so frustrated?

2) Hanover Police chooses to arrest students for drinking even when they do the right thing and go to the hospital when they’ve had far too much. Hanover Police listens to the radio while you are on your way to the hospital, and they’re there to meet you.

3) Chief Nicholas Giaccone has chosen to enforce at these extreme levels; he is not required to do so. Policing has a rich and established history of wide discretion on questions of convivial underage collegiate drinking.

4) The police just over the river at Middlebury have struck the ordinary town-gown compromise, proving that letting college students be is easily done, and revealing that the extreme alcohol enforcement in Hanover is simply the will of individuals rather than an edict from on high.

5) At last night’s meeting, Giaccone referred repeatedly to “the numbers” as the motivating factor in these fresh and invasive enforcement measures, but did not actually refer to any numeral in particular.

6) Drinking at Dartmouth is not, by any estimation, “getting worse”—and everyone knows it.

So wherefore these invisible ciphers who are being paid by Hanover Police and who will lurk silently down your basement steps? Or the cops whose eyes will now be newly attuned to the ribbed red Solo cups? Or the inky new ticket-books with alleged six-figure fines for “serving” alcohol? Why the sudden crusade against our truly blameless debauchery?

I haven’t the faintest idea. Have you? Email us and let us know. We’ll be keeping on this story—and so, undoubtedly, will the legions of Dartmouth lawyers, the hordes of Dartmouth journos, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Stinson. But it is clear that the Hanover Police’s new methods are unjustified by fact, not grounded in history, alone among peers, discriminatory in their targeting, and ultimately dangerous to the health of Dartmouth students. They should be rallied against.

Finally, dear readers, one thought: judges are fair

I moved to California, to wine country, after being graduated from Dartmouth. In fact, I’m involved with a boutique winery. So although I’ve not committed the indiscretion myself, I do know something about people who’ve had one too many and are out in public just a wee bit tipster. And that something is: police are usually reasonable. And when they aren’t reasonable, when the pleasantly sloshed cannot count on that, the judges are.

Last night Giaccone attempted to impress with estimations of possible fines resulting from potential convictions of what appear to be invented crimes discovered through improper and invidiously implemented searches. But he is a messenger outside his writ. In the end it all goes to a judge, who can be counted upon to weigh things fairly. Tremendous measures are in place to ensure that you never get a chance to make a strong defense of yourself, but if it does happen that the Hanover Police’s new methods are implemented, many more of you will avail yourselves of your right to a vigorous defense, and I rather suspect that more will be successful than not.

To be sure, no man deserves a break if he has actually endangered others. But that isn’t what happens at Dartmouth, upon its trim flat plain, where you walk from basement to basement, and eventually to your room, and maybe even to your bed. What happens at Dartmouth is revelry distilled; it is the sort of thing you’ll remember through golden fog just six months after you leave town. Keystone, you, the ping-pong balls: innocents.

Do not permit the momentary impetuousness of Hanover Police Chief Nicholas Giaccone, who believes you should just “go to another Ivy League school” if you don’t like his whimsical methods, to cloister, dangerously and jealously, your spirits.