Lieutenant and 27-year-veteran officer Domenic Pugliares of the Tufts University Police Department offered a snapshot of an officer's typical weekend evening at Tufts when he took this Daily reporter along with his nighttime patrol last week.
In his rounds of campus, Pugliares explained some of the TUPD strategies for dealing with partying students, offering some insight into police behavior.
"Visibility" is the TUPD's main strategy for keeping students under control during patrols, he explained. A constant police presence not only deters students from rowdy and criminal behavior, he said, but also comforts neighbors.
Pugliares drove by the ATO social house every 15 to 20 minutes during the prime of Thursday evening.
If he saw a crowd of students standing outside, he would sometimes pull over across the street. "Just me [being] parked here lets them know ... to start scattering," he said.
On weekend nights, there are two police cars and a motorcycle unit on patrol through the Tufts campus and surrounding side streets as far as Davis Square.
They keep their eyes out for non-students, looking for people circling campus in cars without a Tufts sticker.
TUPD officers will question non-students to make them aware of the police presence, Pugliares said, typically an effective deterrent to criminal behavior.
But police don't drive around looking for parties to shut down, Pugliares said. When most students are out and about, it takes a complaint from neighbors for an officer to enter a party.
But even then, parties "are not automatically shut down because we receive a call," he said.
TUPD patrols are based on the assumption that laws are not being broken inside college parties.
Does Pugliares think underage drinking takes place in most fraternity houses?
"Who's to say?" he said.
He had the same reaction to the prospect of hard drugs, such as cocaine, being used by students on campus. "Who knows? We don't see it," he said.
But to keep tabs on visible, rowdy and disruptive instances of underage drinking, police will check on parties early in the night so they know where students are going and may need to be managed, Pugliares said.
When Pugliares first stopped outside of ATO on Thursday at about 11:45 p.m. he said that he expected the fraternity president to walk over and offer his attention. Sure enough, ATO President Elliot Bodian walked over for a quick conversation.
"I know him by face," Pugliares said.
Bodian said yesterday that he recognized Pugliares as a lieutenant but didn't know him by name.
"We try to be respectful of them, and, in turn, they are very respectful to us," he said. "They're not going to go out of their way to shut us down for no reason."
That is true at least until around 2 a.m., Pugliares said, when all on-campus parties typically get shut down by police.
"As long as there's not people coming in and out of there drinking continuously, you can still have your friends over," he said.
When TUPD received a call and noise complaint from a Latin Way resident about a party in an adjacent Latin Way tower just before 2:00 a.m., Thursday, TUPD broke up the party, dispersing most non-residents.
"When they came here, [they said] if it wasn't as loud and your shades were down we wouldn't have had to come," said a Tufts senior and suite resident who attended the party that night in an interview yesterday.
Names were not used, according to the terms and policy of the police ride-along program.
Police took down her student ID number, saying that she could tell her story to the Dean of Students office if she gets a call from them.
"That's what they have to do, but I had nothing to do with the party," she said.
But her suitemate and the party's hostess, another Tufts senior, said yesterday that the officer that broke up the party spoke to her guests too forcefully.
"It was a party for seniors," she said. "They know how to behave; they don't need to be yelled at."
But Pugliares said that he had received no complaints from students about TUPD conduct. "Nobody's come over and complained about the actions of our officers," Pugliares said. "If we did get feedback, we would have investigated it."
The first senior agreed that the officer who broke up the party did not speak with a friendly tone but said she understood that the officers needed to speak authoritatively.
That was not the case for the hostess, who was surprised to hear another student had called in a complaint.
As an international student, she said cultural differences may shape different perceptions of appropriate weekend behavior.
"Back home, and in other countries I've been to, parties go on until seven or eight in the morning," she said. "It's very different."
But that's not Tufts.
"There's not that many students walking around anymore," Pugliares said at around 1:00 a.m., what he called the "magic hour" when students tend to head home.
Editor's Note: The Daily's Marc Raifman accompanied Tufts Police Lieutenant Domenic Pugliares on a patrol for several hours around the Medford campus the night of Nov. 9, the Thursday before Veterans Day.
