E-Mail This Article to a Friend The party’s over?, continued
	Related Links Boston Police Department Read press releases to find out if the hosts of the party you attended over the weekend were arrested. School policies: Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern University These schools, along with other local universities, post their student codes of responsibility online. Find out what they really expect of you.

In September, the student editorial board of the Boston College Heights voiced criticism of the intensive focus on partying by the police. "[T]rying to curb alcohol consumption is like their crusade," they wrote of the District 14 police officers. "Our community is facing real quality of life issues — and underage drinking is the least of them." In early November, BU’s independent student newspaper, the Daily Free Press, called Operation Student Shield "a misnomer that gives the impression that it is an operation to protect students when in fact it serves more like an offense against students living independently off campus."

Indeed, some of the tactics used by officials sound positively Orwellian. Walsh regularly visits popular liquor stores such as Blanchard’s, at the corner of Harvard and Brighton Avenues, to look through that night’s keg slips, where keg-purchasers are required to provide their local addresses. Walsh, who claims to have a mental Rolodex of which Allston buildings house BU partiers, will often pay those students a pre-kegger home visit.

McLaughlin, the BU student on Ashford, has received one such visit. As he opened his trunk one evening to unload a recently purchased keg, a BU official rolled up to warn him to expect a police visit later that night.

"It was kind of scary," he says. "You don’t want cops to come to your house."

BUSTED IN BROOKLINE

On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights in September and October, party-complaint calls from non-student Allston and Brighton residents — who live on streets such as Pratt, Ashford, and Gardner, or Leamington, Kirkwood, and Radnor — can cause the whole phone system to be backed up 20-30 deep, says Evans.

Over the past few years, Northeastern and BU students have crept into Brookline, causing that town’s police department to take its combat cues from the Boston Police Department.

Prentice Pilot roams Brookline from around 10 pm until 3 or 4 am, responding along with patrol officers to rowdy-party calls from residents. These nighttime rides are one piece of a multi-agency approach that Captain O’Leary calls the "Code Enforcement Group" — Brookline officials who visit problem houses searching for health, sanitation, or building-code violations (such as putting recycling or trash out on the wrong night, or living with more than four unrelated people in one apartment) and basically try to make it more difficult for students to live off-campus.

While the patrolmen take care of business, Pilot’s job is to inform students that if they party too hard, they are risking not only legal sanctions, but academic ones as well. In hallways and on porches, Pilot delivers his rehearsed speech, consistently conveyed in a buddy-buddy tone.

"I’m not trying to be a jackass here," he’ll say. "I’m trying to save you 40 grand."

He’s using a bit of creative license, but the gist of Pilot’s speech is accurate — by partying off-campus, students risk the ultimate academic consequence: expulsion. And there’s no refund if you’re kicked out of school.

That said, most students won’t get booted. But if they tangle with the Brookline or Boston police departments, many will face their university’s judicial process. Their parents will hear about it. That’s all on top of any criminal charges they face.

On a crisp Friday night in October, Pilot gives his first warning at around 11:30 pm, when a party complaint comes in about a Thorndike Street apartment shared by BU and Northeastern students on the border of Allston. The patrolmen have to knock twice before a guy opens the door. He’s warned that if the officers have to come back, the party’s over.

Back outside, a neighbor (the one who called the cops in the first place) comes down her driveway toward the officers. "They come every single Friday," she tells them, bordering on hysterical. "It goes all night long. They have barrels of beer — and they can’t all be 21!"

Meanwhile, audible carousing has resumed upstairs, helping the angry woman make her case. At the same door, the officer is waylaid by a dopey drunk who emerges to take full responsibility for the noise — even though he doesn’t live in the apartment. When he’s asked about his age, the young man responds quizzically: "You mean me, personally?" (Turns out he’s 20.)

The cops break it up. At least 50 kids file out of the apartment, and there’s running commentary about where to go next. "Dude," one girl sing-songs as she traipses down the stairs. "Bust-ed."

Pilot visits three more apartments over the course of the evening; at one point, a community-affairs officer climbs onto an apartment roof with binoculars to monitor foot traffic on Egmont Street.

"If you are making noise at three o’clock in Brookline, you are sauced," Pilot says when a noise complaint comes in at 2:56 am. But when we show up, it’s one dude and his roommate, throwing darts and playing music from an iPod. The guy who answers the door doesn’t seem trashed, or even tipsy. Pilot and the patrolmen forgo their speeches: "It’s time to turn down the music for the night."

THE DAY AFTER

One morning last year, 23-year-old Northeastern graduate Graham Masser woke up to a note on the door of the Mission Hill house he shared with four other guys.

The message, left alongside several beer bottles that had apparently been left on the street, read: "What are you going to do for the rest of your life? Are you going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or dope?"

Putting aside the questionable sentence construction, the message was clear: you disrespectful kids are ruining our neighborhood.

Last year, after the Mission Hill police came to a party at Masser’s house, he had to visit the court magistrate for the "bullshit charge they give you" (he was charged with operating a disorderly house). The meeting didn’t make much of an impression. "He told us why we were assholes, and how we were jeopardizing our future," Masser recalls. Aware of the potential academic consequences, Masser avoided a run-in with Northeastern officials by providing his information, but leaving out his student status. "I think it’s completely ridiculous, because if you live off-campus, [the school] shouldn’t be involved at all," he says about the notification policy. "You’re paying to live off-campus, you’re living in an entirely different community."

Tough talk. But according to Captain Evans, the party-busting expert, the tide is turning and police officers are given little resistance when they come knocking. (Last Friday, when two officers showed up at a Pratt Street cast party, cigarette smokers milling around outside got skittish when they saw the cop car pull up in front of the house.) Not only that, but Evans — who has patrolled these streets for 23 years — is convinced that "honestly, it’s gotten a lot better." Where District 14 cops had arrested between 60 and 70 students last year, they’ve only arrested about 40 so far this year. "We’re trying to change the culture," Evans says.

Residents who remain in the neighborhoods (many have fled for quieter streets, where kids don’t urinate in their backyards) may disagree with Evans’s encouraging portrayal. Indeed, even BU’s Walsh says that if things are improving in Allston-Brighton, "I think part of that is a function of the fact that there aren’t many families left." To combat family flight in his district, City Councilor Jerry McDermott has been pushing local universities to house 100 percent of their students on-campus. Several councilors, including McDermott and Back Bay’s Mike Ross, back other party-busting strategies such as citywide keg-tracking regulations and the University Accountability Ordinance, which would require colleges to provide the city with information about their off-campus populations.

Meanwhile, Evans remains optimistic: "Years ago, when we used to go to these parties, the kids used to give us a worse time. I like to say that we’ve gotten a lot more respected. A lot of times now when we show up, you can hear a lot of kids running out the back door."

Deirdre Fulton can be reached at dfulton[a]phx.com.