Local television news teams broadcast live Sept. 30 from University student Zack Shleifer’s home on Alder Street as Eugene police officers cited 21 partygoers for being minors in possession of alcohol and two for allowing consumption of alcohol by minors. The officers arrested one person for interfering with police.
It was, as Shleifer put it, a circus.
“It really upset me how the media got in my house and were filming outside,” Shleifer, 19, said. “The police just let them do it.”
He was slapped with a $350 citation — his first — for allowing minors to consume alcohol on his property and will go to Eugene Municipal Court in two weeks, he said.
A few blocks away on Hilyard Street, eight police officers crashed a party at 21-year-old Hayden Llewellyn’s house. The officers cited five people for MIPs and three for allowing minors to consume alcohol on the property. The festivities ended in somber silence as Llewellyn and his friends sat quietly while officers checked their identification and administered sobriety tests, Llewellyn said.
“About an hour before they showed up, there were, like, 40 people here. We asked [many of] them to leave, and there were only 15 of us sitting around when [police] came in.”
Llewellyn said this was his first citation.
But the problem last weekend was larger than a couple of parties. The Eugene Police Department issued more than 55 MIP citations and 15 citations for allowing consumption of alcohol by minors. But EPD spokeswoman Jan Power said the big football victory last weekend — or anything else, for that matter — didn’t make last weekend especially bad for parties in the University area.
“We have a problem with that every weekend,” Power said. “If you look at a three-year history, you’ll see it’s a significant problem most weekends during the school year.”
But the one difference that sets last weekend, as well as this coming weekend, apart from others is that students who get busted can avoid hefty fines with a new University program — and many students, like Shleifer and Llewellyn, are.
BUSTED, or Beginning Underage Success Through Educational Diversion, is a 10-hour course offered through the University, and it is open to all 18- to 20-year-olds in the Eugene area, said Miki Mace, administrator for the University’s Substance Abuse and Prevention Program.
Mace said more organizations like hers are offering proactive choices for those cited for MIPs or allowing consumption of alcohol by minors.
“If [people] make choices to reduce their drinking, we take a look at things like what does their support system look like,” Mace said. “If the only thing they do when they go out with their friends is drink, we look at if these people are really their friends. If they give them a hard time about not drinking, they may not be.”
The course is also about reducing the debt burden on those cited.
“The goal is to give people alternatives to paying fines,” Mace said. “It appears to us that fines don’t work; all they do is punish.”
Mace said research done by the program indicates that many MIP recipients have been cited for the offense two or three times previously.
“I think many of them don’t have the information to make different choices,” Mace said.
To participate in BUSTED, students must pay a court cost of $50 and a University fee of $35. Participants also must have completed Drinking Decisions, a 20- to 30-hour educational course similar to BUSTED. Upon successful completion of BUSTED, first-time offenders can have their citation fees waived, Mace said, as long as they haven’t had any drinking offenses in the four months following the class. The course also offers participants the chance to earn college credit.
Llewellyn said the $350 cost of his citation will virtually force him to use BUSTED after he goes to court, but he has mixed feelings about the program.
“It’s essentially an educational diversion,” he said. “I don’t like it, but it’s kind of good. It gives people with money the easy way out and just pay [the fine]. It sticks it to those who don’t [have enough money].”
For Shleifer, whose busted party was broadcast on the local news, the course will make his $350 citation manageable.
“The class is will be a good experience because the vast majority of students at the U of O are exposed to alcohol,” he said. “The class offers the opportunity to help with that.”