Ordinance has had a positive impact

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By Sam Hargadine and Chuck Green

With a combined 50 years of policing in college town environments, we have learned that you cannot underestimate the desire, creativity and ingenuity of people who are determined to have fun. However, choosing the wrong type of fun can often result in undesirable consequences.

We are both fathers who, thankfully, have seen our own children graduate from college. Many times we are asked by parents: “What are you doing to guarantee my child's safety?” Safety is most certainly a shared responsibility. As parents, we cannot ensure our own children's safety even in our homes, but when they go off to higher learning with 30,000 other young people, somehow that institution and city is expected to ensure their safety. We do provide a ton of information, services and support to help people enhance their own safety; however, we can never guarantee it.

We firmly believe that the 21-only bar ordinance has had a positive impact. Two issues dominate the community discussion.

Opponents of 21-only contend that minors are safer in bars than if denied entry after 10 p.m. The argument is that bar employees are trained to prevent minors from drinking and will keep an eye on them if they do drink. It is a fact that minors regularly obtained alcohol in downtown bars before the ordinance. In the first three months of the ordinance, and despite heavy police enforcement, the rate of underage consumption in bars as measured by underage possession citations dropped more than 90 percent. Also before the ordinance, almost half of 911 calls downtown concerned alcohol, 19-year-olds were the most common victim, and the trend was worsening. These are individuals so intoxicated they need an ambulance. Minors are not safer in bars.

We believe the ordinance is working. In the downtown, Goosetown, Northside, College Green and Longfellow neighborhoods, for the period June 1 through mid-September, calls to police

for loud parties were

3 percent lower than the same period in 2009. Calls for sexual assaults were down 75 percent. And calls for intoxicated pedestrians were down

56 percent. In the downtown area alone, public intoxication arrests dropped 46 percent and simple assault arrests declined 83 percent.

Downtown is calmer, and this allows us to redirect our officers to our near-campus neighborhoods and other parts of town. Drunken driving has decreased, in part due to a decrease in people driving to our community for easy access to the bars. For someone contemplating a road trip to Iowa City, house parties are far less attractive than bars.

Another argument from 21-only opponents is that the ordinance will push all the underage drinkers into the near-campus neighborhoods. We anticipated a temporary increase in house parties and adjusted our policing levels to accommodate any problems. Aggressive monitoring by neighborhoods, combined with responsive police enforcement, is the key and we ask the community's patience to allow the ordinance to work.

We cannot set a tone that implies that there are some laws, such as the state-mandated legal drinking age, that are not meant to be followed.

We will continue to take a proactive stance to ensure that our community remains vibrant, safe and secure.

Sam Hargadine is the Iowa City Chief of Police; Chuck Green is the Director of Public Safety at the University of Iowa. Comments: shargadine@gmail.com; charles-green@uiowa.edu