A 45 percent decrease in noise related arrests may be due to students complying with the nuisance party ordinance.
After seeing four years of parties at Ohio University, Eli Burris said he's noticed his peers complying more with local law enforcement.
Burris, a senior studying strategic communication, said that may be because college students don't want "one mistake" to impact their future, leading them to behave more at parties.
In the past year, the Athens Police Department has reported an increase in nuisance party violations, but a decrease in noise-related arrests. APD recorded 80 percent more nuisance party violations in 2015, most of which took place during fest season, Athens Police Department Chief Tom Pyle said.
Pyle said before fest season this year, his department had about two or three nuisance party violations. Now that the season is over, his department has seen about 35 violations, he said.
“Most of those were just documentation of nuisance party declaration at fests,” Pyle said.
Nuisance party violations are usually an observation that a party is out of control, Pyle said. According to the city's Nuisance Party Law, a nuisance party is "a social gathering or party" conducted within the city that violates a number of conditions.
“If you think of the nuisance party ordinance as a tree, one branch would be noise and another branch would be litter, another branch would be disorderly conduct or alcohol violations, another branch could be assault,” Pyle said.
If anyone “breaks one of those branches,” the party gets shut down, Pyle said.
Burris said he’s seen more compliance recently, adding the police have been “pretty chill” when telling people to shut a party down.
“They find whoever lives in the house and request to shut it down,” Burris said.
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Noise-related arrests are at an 11-year low, with only 569 recorded in 2015, according to the department's annual report.
“We set out five years ago to do an enhanced enforcement of the noise ordinance,” Pyle said. “We knew that our long term goal was voluntary compliance.”
During the past 11 years, noise-related arrests have been declining, and that may be due to more voluntary compliance from students, Pyle said.
Pyle said APD predicted that if it was successful in having voluntary compliance, the overall number of noise complaints would drop. He added that APD has been able to impact the culture involving noise violations, pointing to less stereos and other loud music on streets.
“If you drive down Mill Street at midnight on a weekend, you’ll hear very few stereos in violation of the noise ordinance,” Pyle said.
On the other side of town, the Ohio University Police Department rarely gets noise complaints, Lt. Tim Ryan said.
When OUPD has made noise-related arrests, the majority of them came from when the department was working fests, Ryan said.
“We get them, but they’re not to the extent that the city does,” Ryan said.
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