Dartblog

Dartmouth students can be really impressive. David Imamura ‘10 and Eli Mitchell ‘10 spoke calmly and thoughtfully last night to a Selectboard that seemed to not have expected the whirlwind that Chief of Police Giaccone unleashed on Thursday. Their comments came at the start of the Selectboard meeting, a time traditionally open to remarks from the floor on any issue of moment.

Imamura cited numerous studies and spoke firmly about the need for the Hanover Police to hold off on implementing its recent racheting up of underage drinking laws enforcement. He cited with particular effect the experience of Hamilton College, where drinking was driven underground by harsh enforcement, with the result that drinking increased and the risk to student health did as well.

Mitchell spoke from the additional perspective of a Town resident, and invoked the concern that Hanover Po’s policies would drive student parties into private houses in Hanover neighborhoods.

The College’s alumni didn’t do badly either, with AD advisor John Engelman ‘68 and your humble servant weighing in. Engelman noted that students will drink no matter what the strategies of the police, and that student safety was paramount. I noted the experience of other colleges and universities, citing the fact, as I have observed on Dartblog, that there were more police arrests of students for alcohol violations in Hanover in 2006-2008 (212) than in all of the other Ivy League towns combined during that period (169). I asked the Selectboard to examine the policies of other schools with the view to leaving the enforcement on the underage drinking laws in the hands of the campus police.

Selectboard Chairman Brian Walsh and the other Selectmen listened attentively, but Walsh noted that the Board could not formally take up the police enforcement issue until a Selectboard meeting in mid-March or even April. The Town is currently deep in its annual budget process. He warmly welcomed the offer of students to work cooperatively with the Town Police and the Selectboard, but he repeatedly lamented the fact that students so frequently over-indulge that they need medical assistance and run the risk of alcohol poisoning.

Our friend Tim Dreisbach writes in The Valley News: “Was Robin Hood a Hero?”

N.B. 1420 was the first written reference of Robin Hood, in Andrew of Wyntoun.

The Trustees have issued a press release and President Kim has sent a letter to the entire Dartmouth community about the budget cuts.

Additionally, the Trustees announced a 4.6% increase in tuition, room, board and fees for 2010-2011.

On this latter point, I wish that the Trustees wouldn’t be so transparently cheesy in their marketing. The College’s press release trumpets the fact that this increase in tuition is the “Smallest Percentage Increase in Five Years.” That statement is true, but only as far as it goes. There was no inflation at all in 2009; in fact, there was deflation: the Consumer Price Index dropped by 0.36%. A more appropriate headline would be: “College Raises Tuition Far Beyond Inflation Rate.”

Here are the tuition increase stats for the preceding five years:

2009/2010: 4.8% (Inflation in 2008 was: 3.84%)

2008/2009: 4.9% (Inflation in 2007 was: 2.85%)

2007/2008: 5.0% (Inflation in 2006 was: 3.32%)

2006/2007: 4.8% (Inflation in 2005 was: 3.39%)

2005/2006: 4.9% (Inflation in 2004 was: 2.66%)

Seems like the College has decided that 5.0% constitutes a marketing barrier. Don’t think that any of these increases had anything to go with an actual calculation of costs.

In a column in the D entitled Dining Halt, Leonard Lewis makes an observation about Dartmouth Dining Services that I have heard before from football players who eat at EBA’s and other local establishments:

Many students, however, would prefer to buy DDS food on an item-by-item basis and spend more of their money at Hanover-area grocery stores and restaurants. Anyone who has cashed out at Home Plate with a $15 meal has probably noted that he or she could have eaten well at Yama for the same price.

How is it possible for students to eat at a Hanover restaurant for a price equivalent to a meal at Thayer?

A local restaurant has to cover the cost of its investment in equipment, the mortgage on its building, and it needs to earn a profit on its capital to make the whole effort worthwhile. Beyond that, the restaurant staff takes your order, prepares your food specifically for you, serves it to you at your table, and busses your plates and cutlery when you are done.

In contrast, DDS has no investment to pay for because donors covered all the initial cost of construction, it probably runs at a loss, and it serves you hockey pucks from a steam table as you stand in your very own food assembly line. You bring your food to table yourself, and you bus your own plates. And Thayer certainly gets better prices on the products that it buys compared to a local restaurant because it is a high-volume purchaser and a reliably solvent customer.

If you are a confirmed reader of Dartblog, the answer to the above question should be obvious to you. If not, let me give you a hint: expensive labor, lush benefits, long vacations, and slow-moving management. DDS is being run for its employees — not its customers.

If you accept the present situation, and you feel that it is part of social justice for students to overpay at Thayer for mediocre food, well, I guess that you also feel that it is just to pay a great deal of money for an education that it not nearly as good as it could be. I don’t. Dartmouth employees should be paid the level of wages and benefits that prevails in our community. The surplus should go to hire new professors, or — here’s a radical idea — to allow for tuition increases that stay in line with inflation.

Note: It is high time to have an independent company come in and run DDS — just like the competent hotel company that will soon manage the Hanover Inn in a professional and economical manner.

Correction: The first version of this post assumed that Dartmouth does not pay property tax to the Town of Hanover on Thayer Dining Hall. An alert Dartblog reader pointed out that the College does indeed pay tax on Thayer, along with dormitories and other parts of the College that are not considered to be part of its academic function. A phone call to the Town Assessor, Mike Ryan, confirmed this point. Apologies for the error.

Let’s compare the Hanover Po’s vigorous prosecution of Dartmouth’s underage drinkers with the activities of the police forces in Providence, Manhattan, Cambridge, Princeton, New Haven, Philadelphia and Ithaca.

In the 2006-2008 period, Brown, Columbia and Harvard saw no police arrests at all; Princeton had 12; Yale had 65; Penn had 54; and only 38 of Cornell’s 13,562 undergrads were arrested by the Ithaca police for alcohol violations. That’s a total for all of the Ivies of 169 arrests.

However, among Dartmouth’s undergraduate student population of 4,164, the smallest in the Ivy League, during the same time period there were 212 alcohol arrests by the Hanover Police.

Here’s how to take a look at the federal government’s Clery Act stats for any school in the country.

Pace John Keats, but one of Dartmouth’s many Olympians will be playing her last regular-season home game today at 4pm, and it is worth noting the unfailing intelligence of Sarah Parsons’ hockey.

Unlike football’s set-piece choreography or baseball’s individual ballet, hockey is a swirling series of instinctive, high-speed group improvisations. There are formal plays, but most of the game takes place on the fly, a multi-variable equation that will never be solved.

For the devoted fan, much of the pleasure lies in the anticipation; but a greater joy comes from surprise, and that is where Sarah Parsons stands alone on the women’s team. Nobody so consistently sees creative angles and unusual opportunities as she does; no one is so original.

I recall Sarah being half-way over the boards earlier in the season and a teammate passed her puck while she was still in the air. I shuddered, “What is she going to do?” But in one moment of penetrating insight, she sized up the on-ice situation, spotted another fast-moving teammate, landed on her skates, and made a one-touch pass that ended directly in a goal. Tension, execution, resolution. Beauty.

Not bad. Sarah could act faster than I could anticipate. Not bad at all.

Next year she will be playing for Morgan Stanley in New York. I’d buy stock now. She’ll improve that team a great deal, too.

Thanks, Sarah, for four years of really smart hockey.

“Set the drinking age at 18 or 21 and woe betide those who drink too young!” This seems to be the gist of the rigid positions held by the Amethyst Initiative and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in the debate over the legal drinking age.

Well, fortunately for students, there is a third position, one that recognizes that laws are sometimes supple and can be applied with intelligent discretion by the police (and campus security). To put it more bluntly, not all laws are enforced to their absolute limit in our society. This is one of the ways that our democracy organically adjusts itself to meet citizens’ real needs. Ask a cop if you will be ticketed for driving 70mph or 75mph on an interstate. A thoughtful officer will tell you that speeding is illegal, but as a rule, police departments turn a blind eye to people driving between 65mph and 75mph, unless they are driving dangerously.

Or study the current enforcement of the soft-drug laws, as society moves toward the legalization of marijuana. Smoke dope at noon on Main Street and you might have a problem; smoke at a concert or in your own home and you won’t be bothered.

Look to the past and try to find enforcement of the laws against adultery and fornication, laws that are still on the books in some states. The police began turning a blind eye to these infractions many decades ago.

While some people’s sense of moral rectitude might be offended, in our flexible society the parts of laws that make no intrinsic sense are adapted and modified by prosecutors and the police until they do­—and eventually the legislature catches up, if it can. Call it the rule of common sense: safety and other considerations are given priority over legal interpretations that produce unduly harsh results. An ideal drinking law would read as follows:

People under 21 may not purchase alcohol (because we don’t want younger purchasers to give booze to high school students); however, people under 21 living in a residential community with people 21 or over may drink (because there is little likelihood that they will then drive drunk, and we can’t effectively enforce an underage drinking law in these communities).

Of course, no drinking law could ever be written this way, but this is how the law is actually being applied at most colleges and in the privacy of people’s homes. Safety should be our primary concern and some colleges, like Yale, have been explicit about this point. In contrast, Dartmouth’s vindictive enforcement of the alcohol (and drug) laws in past years has been the exception to the elastic application of these laws at other schools.

Why does the current compromise work? Because it achieves MADD’s goal of reducing traffic fatalities, and it works to insulate high schools from easy access to alcohol. And for colleges that are not foolishly fastidious, it relieves administrators of the impossible burden of enforcing a modern-day Prohibition. It also allows students who want to drink to stay on campus and out of their cars.

The Amethyst Initiative’s academic leaders seem to want to find an ideal solution, but their perfectionism is the enemy of the good. The proposal to lower the drinking age to 18 does not respond to the valid concerns of MADD, high school educators, and parents who fear excessive alcohol consumption. There is no perfect solution to the drinking problem; the messy current situation is the best option.

College presidents who are concerned with student binge drinking (a practice which seems to date back to Ancient Greece and probably beyond) should stick to what they know best: education. Rather than lobbying Washington to formally allow freshman to drink beer, they should teach their students to behave responsibly.

There is one other dogmatic constituency in this argument: people, mostly students, who argue that if 18-year-olds can vote and serve in the military, then they should be allowed to drink.

Beyond the glib rejoinder that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, it is worth pointing out that society imposes many other age restrictions inconsistent with the supposedly magic age of majority: you can drive when you are 16 in most states; you must be 21 to gamble legally; you need to be 35 to be elected President, and so on. The choice of an appropriate drinking age needs to be made with greater care than simply aligning it with other rights and obligations.

Note: This piece was previously published in the Dartmouth Review — after the D refused to print it.

Some speculation on what is driving the Hanover Town Police to ramp up its already severe enforcement of the alcohol laws.

On September 24, 2009, Dartblog published a piece describing how throughout the previous administration, Dartmouth Safety & Security worked hand and glove with the Hanover Police in having students prosecuted for alcohol violations. We cited excerpts from the D’s wonderful Police Blotter, to wit:

Dartmouth Safety and Security was called to a room in Mid-Massachusetts Hall to provide assistance to a 20-year old female, who was described as having projectile-vomited all over herself and the room. Safety and Security turned her over to Hanover Police, who transported her to DHMC. One Hanover Police officer described the scene as “pretty nasty.” She is scheduled for an appearance in court on April 22, but is eligible for the alcohol diversion program. [From The Dartmouth’s Police Blotter column]

Interestingly, in subsequent Police Blotters, there were no reports of direct calls by S&S to the Hanover Police, though there were several instances in which S&S did call the Town ambualance, and then Hanover Po joined in to make the collar.

Could it be that the Kim adminstration has instructed S&S to seek to avoid having Dartmouth students arrested for alcohol violations? Seems sensible to me. And could it be that the Hanover Police has decided to respond to this lack of cooperation by turning up the heat?

I am waiting to hear back from Harry Kinne, the former Head of S&S, and Interim Head Keiselim Montas, for their thoughts on this question.

Hanover Police Chief Giaccone is so transparently off-base on the alcohol issue that even a clueless freshman from the worst class ever gets all the issues right and expresses his concern cogently:

Hey Joe,

I am a ‘13 from New York and just wanted to discuss the issue with you a little.

When I was a freshman in high school, the county where I grew up outside of NYC tried a similar tactic. Non-uniformed officers and unmarked cars.

The motivation came from a DA who was looking for votes and for money. The obvious guess now is that the Hanover police department is looking for press and money so that they will not be hurt by budget cuts.

Another angle is that this policy is punishing Dartmouth for being responsible. The police chief’s numbers are no doubt inflated due to arrests of which the majority are Good Sam police chasings.

Dartmouth students are being responsible and are calling those in. So are the Chief’s high numbers a result of better judgement by students? Is he prompting us not to call in drunk students?

Moreover, kids will drink regardless. If you force kids out of a frat and into a dorm room where you replace beer with hard alcohol, the number of alcohol poisoning cases will increase exponentially.

Frats provide an area where older students can look after younger ones. Put a bunch of freshmen in a dorm room for a couple hours with a handle or two of vodka and it will not turn out well.

Not to mention they won’t want to call Good Sam now for fear of more repercussions from the police .

Good job posting the information. I hope you and the rest of the alumni/administration can make a difference. I loved Dartmouth for the first half of my freshman year and I hope to continue that.

Sincerely,

An otherwise clueless freshman.

The Town of Hanover municipal government is overseen by a Board of Selectmen composed of the following people:

Brian F. Walsh, Chairman
52 Berrill Farms Lane, Hanover, NH 03755, H-643-8296

Katherine S. Connolly, Vice Chairman
2 Pleasant Street, Hanover, NH 03755, H-643-3822

Peter L. Christie
5 Sugar Maple Lane, PO Box 2, Etna, NH 03750, H-448-1737

Athos J. Rassias
14 Carriage Lane, Hanover, NH 03755, H-643-4602

Judith A. Doherty, Secretary
97 Greensboro Road, Hanover, NH 03755, H-643-4071

The Selectboard hires a Town Manager who supervises the day-to-day operations of the Town. The Chief of Police reports to the Town Manager:

Julia N. Griffin, Town Manager
E-Mail: townmgr@hanovernh.org, Phone: 640-3211

Penny Hoisington, Executive Assistant
E-Mail: penny.hoisington@hanovernh.org, Phone: 640-3210

The members of the Selectboard meet as follows:

All public meetings of The Hanover Board of Selectmen are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. usually on the first and third Mondays of the month in the Board Room at the Municipal Building, 41 So. Main St., Hanover, unless otherwise noted and/or posted. The next meeting will be:

February 8 Open Meeting at 7:30pm

The public is invited to comment on any issue at the start of the meeting, whether that issue is on the Selectboard’s agenda or not.

I’ll see you there.

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.

So what is going on here? Some background:

Erstwhile Dean of the College Tom Crady explicitly sought to lighten the enforcement of the alcohol laws by Safety & Security so that the College’s efforts would be in line with the policies at most other institutions. He had written his Ph.D. dissertation on alcohol enforcement at undergraduate institutions. Crady told me that, curiously, the biggest barrier to change was the staff members in his own office. This latter point might explain the stop-and-go implementation of any new SEMP/AMP policy and the delays in the reform of the student adjudication board. Crady said that he had also planned to work with the H.Po on enforcement.

President Kim has commented that he would seek to relax the environment around alcohol on campus so that safety would be the primary goal of Dartmouth’s Safety and Security force, and that students’ educational futures would not be jeopardized by over-zealous enforcement of the laws.

The new Dean of the College, Sylvia Spears, has been circumspect on the subject. The only clue to her thoughts might be that alcohol enforcement at the University of Rhode Island — the institution from which she has obtained all of her degrees — seems to mirror Hanover in hostility.

Dartblog posted extensively on the subject in the fall. Read the eight posts in order: the first here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here the seventh here and the eighth here. Did we stir up a hornet’s nest by negatively comparing H.Po. to municipal forces like that of Middlebury, Vermont?

I doubt it. My sense is that all of the above factors pushed a rigid officer of the law in a direction that he did not want to go, and now he is pushing back. With what goal? To declare his independence? To strike back at students that he perceives as spoiled? To encourage to Town to buy out his contract?

Who knows? We are in for several eventful months.

Oh, and have a great Winter Carnival.

Students in attendance at the meeting and their advisors were vigorous in their response.

The first volley of questions sought to determine why this policy was being put into place now. Students stated that alcohol use had not varied in recent years, and if the number of Good Sam calls had increased slightly last year, this change was due entirely to students prudently using Good Sam for the safety of fellow students. A few observed that the new policy was a negative response to students’ more responsible behavior.

Numerous students mentioned that the policy would drive drinking behind closed doors and would end Dartmouth’s long, cherished tradition of open Greek parties. Students would now pre-game in their dorms, and then go to Greek houses that would only be open to brothers/sisters and their named guests (so that sting operatives would not be able to gain access to the houses).

A number of students sought to be conciliatory, asking for a “grace period” before the new enforcement régime was put into place, or asking the police to work more cooperatively with the Greeks on the problem, or suggesting that education was the solution rather than harsher punishment. Students sought to speak truth to power, but power was all they got in return from an intransigent Chief and his aggressive prosecutor.

I commented publicly at the meeting that this level of enforcement was no more than vindictive punishment, and was not at all necessary, given that the Hanover Police could use its discretion to limit its enforcement of alcohol-related laws on the books — in the same way that all of the municipal police departments at other Ivy schools turn a blind eye to student drinking on campus. I mentioned that the enforcement of the alcohol laws by the H. Po had long been the harshest in the Ivy League, with no positive result, and that tightened enforcement could lead to dangerous consequences if students feared to enlist the aid of the police in the case of severely intoxicated friends.

The Chief seemed to acknowledge that enforcement was different in other Ivy towns when he replied that if students “don’t like it in Hanover, they can go to another Ivy League school.”

Chief Giaccone’s presentation began with the observation that alcohol abuse by Dartmouth students seemed have increased in the past months and therefore the Town Police was going to ramp up its enforcement efforts to a new level. The Chief cited past fatalities in Hanover as a result of alcohol abuse, dangerous behavior due to inebriation (“roof surfing”) and sexual assaults in which alcohol was involved.

The Chief referred repeatedly to the “numbers” 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.

I asked the College’s counsel, Bob Donin, who was in attendance, if the College was aware of the H.Po’s new campaign, and he said that the College was not aware of this development.

At a meeting this evening at the Town of Hanover offices, Chief of Police Nick Giaccone announced to the assembled leaders of the College’s Greek organizations that due to “numbers” which pointed to increased drinking by Dartmouth students, the Hanover Police’s alcohol-related law enforcement efforts would increase dramatically.

In addition to the Chief, Prosecutor Christopher O’Connor, Detective Frank Moran, and another member of the force were in attendance.

The meeting took place after the circulation of the following blitz:

Dear Greek Letter Organizations and Society Presidents, Greek Leadership Council Moderator, Panhellenic Council President, Interfraternity Council President, Coed
Council President, and GLOS Advisors:

The Hanover Police Department would like to invite you to a meeting at the
Hanover Town Hall, (second floor), on Thursday, February 4th at 5:00PM. The
purpose of the meeting will be to share concerns regarding adherence to NH
liquor laws, possible police responses, and general legal consequences.
This should be an opportunity for some open dialogue.

We are seeking to limit attendance to just one individual from each Greek
Letter Organization or Society (preferably the president) along with the
council presidents on the distribution list and one GLOS advisor from each
organization. In your absence, you are encouraged to send
a substitute officer from your organization. We ask that you bring
Dartmouth College identification where applicable, and sign-in upon arrival.

Please announce your intent to participate in an email to Detective Captain
Francis Moran, (Francis.Moran@HanoverNH.Org).