In an email sent to Boston University students on Friday, the BU Police Department and Boston Police Department revealed their new enforcement program to crack down on underage drinking off-campus.
The BUPD will be teaming up with both the Boston Police Department and the Brookline Police to patrol the areas of Allston and Brookline on weekends to “assess, investigate, and address outstanding and reoccurring public safety issues” according to the email . There will be heavy patrols on streets known for parties, including Gardner, Ashford and Pratt. BUPD has also alerted the Brookline Police to patrol local liquor stores to ensure that minors cannot buy or procure alcohol from others.
While measures like these are important when it comes to student safety, an extensive operation such as the BUPD’s plan entails seems a bit like overkill. Obviously, underage drinking is a huge issue, but the police department would do well to ensure safety in other ways before it focuses such an enormous amount of attention on freshmen at frat parties. Allston is a notoriously unsafe area, with or without the underage drinking that goes on within the region’s limits, and there are far more serious, dangerous crimes that could be curbed by a higher enforcement program.
Additionally, students who moved off-campus to Allston and Brookline did so for a reason. While it is important to keep students safe, invading off-campus territories with constant patrols and threats will become a headache for off-campus residents and only increases stress among the student body.
Did BUPD’s email deter the hundreds of freshmen who flooded the Allston streets last weekend? No, of course not. There will always be parties, and there will always be freshmen walking the streets trying to get into one. No amount of law enforcement is going to change that.
This is not to say that a police presence should be absent from off-campus weekends. Keeping students safe should naturally be the BUPD’s number one priority, but their new approach seems questionable at best in effectiveness. The police should focus on other instances of crime in Allston that are more dangerous than freshmen experimenting with alcohol at their first real college party. Bigger threats exist elsewhere that should be dealt with first.