Hanover police delay Dartmouth frat infiltration

A recent sting operation policy announced by the Hanover police has students at Dartmouth College — as well as other Ivy League students and administrators — discussing drinking culture on campus.

On Feb. 4, Hanover Police Chief Nicholas Giaccone held a meeting with the presidents of Greek organizations at Dartmouth and their alumni advisors to let them know about plans to launch compliance checks to curb a perceived rise in alcohol abuse, according to Dartmouth senior and president of the college’s Interfraternity Council Zachary Gottlieb.

The policy would have allowed police to send people posing as underage partygoers into Greek events in order to determine if they could obtain alcohol.

But according to a press release dated Feb. 10 — six days after the initial announcement — the operations have been delayed, pending “meaningful change” in efforts to reduce alcohol abuse at Dartmouth.

Penn Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush noted Dartmouth’s lack of a campus police department is a key difference between the universities’ alcohol policies.

Rush said the Division of Public Safety’s priority is “not to see how many students we can arrest, but to make sure students behave responsibly.”

At Penn, “underage drinking is not encouraged, but if someone is ill, they will not be arrested, they will be referred to the Office of Student Conduct,” she added.

“We have a unique system in which houses are open to everyone in the Dartmouth community,” explained Dartmouth senior David Imamura, vice-president of the school’s Interfraternity Council. “We’re proud of that openness and transparency. Our fear was that [the policy change] would have driven drinking underground and shut down fraternities and sororities,” he said.

The Hanover Police Department press release attributes the decision to delay the implementation of the policy in part to increased accountability for students to reduce alcohol abuse on their own, adding that students are “committed to working energetically to achieve harm reduction.”

Some Dartmouth students met last Thursday to develop plans to address alcohol-related arrests. “Hopefully we’ll be able to meet on a weekly basis,” Gottlieb said.

According to campus newspaper The Dartmouth, Giaccone cited the arrests of 75 students since September 2009 — an increase from past years — and the 11 victims of alcohol-related sexual assault in 2008 as reasons for the compliance checks.

Imamura said Hanover police hastily concluded that an increase in arrests meant an increase in drinking. “Since Hanover will always arrest if [students] need to go to the hospital, the number of arrests went up. We firmly believe that the reason for the increase of the arrests is that we were in fact taking the safer approach of seeking help.”

Though Dartmouth has a “Good Samaritan” alcohol policy in which intoxicated students can receive assistance from Safety and Security without disciplinary action, they may run into legal repercussions if they need to be hospitalized.

Dartmouth senior and Student Body President Frances Vernon emphasized that the issue “challenges us as students to look at a culture in our community and ask what we need to do to change that sense of culture.” She mentioned a possible student-run adjudication system to create peer accountability.

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