The chief of the Muncie Police Department said Thursday that the city's crackdown on off-campus house parties will be "hit and miss" for the rest of the semester.
Chief Joe Winkle did not say that the crackdown was ending. In fact, he said that when students return in the fall, his officers will be out in force for the first three or four weekends. However, he did say the nights he sends his officers out to crack down on students, and even the number of officers he sends out, will vary for the rest of the year.
"We're obviously not going to be out every Thursday, Friday and Saturday," Winkle said. "We won't be out every night, but we'll be out some nights."
Muncie Mayor Dan Canan said authorities are not backing off of their promise to crack down on off-campus house parties. In fact, he said the crackdown has managed to curtail the number of parties students are holding, and therefore there is less to crack down on.
"It'd be foolish for us to pay huge amounts of overtime when there's not the demand out there," Canan said.
Once students leave for Summer Break, Winkle said the Muncie Police will approach house parties similarly to the way they treated them before the crackdown.
"The huge parties in the summer aren't the same," Winkle said. "We'll address those kind of how we have in the past."
Meanwhile, Ball State is continuing to expand its "Police Yourself" campaign, the advertising campaign designed to warn students of the consequences of drinking excessively or underage. Two pages have been added to the Web site, www.bsu.edu/policeyourself.
The first page, "Party Safely," is a list of tips for people who want to throw a legal party. Heather Shupp, executive director of University Communications, said the tips will be printed out on small cards for University Police officers to hand out to students at parties they encounter on patrols.
The second page, "Fiction and Fact," is a list of rumors Ball State administrators have heard about the "Police Yourself" campaign and the crackdown by the Muncie Police. Rumors that administrators try to dispel on the page include the ideas that the university is blaming students for all of the bad things that have happened this year, or that University Police officers have been stopping students as they return to the residence halls to see whether they are intoxicated.
"There isn't any basis for that," Shupp said.
The campaign will also continue to expand next year, Shupp said. She said it is "obviously related" to the crackdown by Muncie Police, but she said the purpose of "Police Yourself" is to educate students, not punish them.
"I would never want to refer to 'Police Yourself' as an enforcement effort," Shupp said. "I don't think that's how it was conceived."
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