With bar raids absent from Marshall Street for more than a year, underage Syracuse University students were able to drink at bars without fear – or consequences.

‘Operation Prevent became more folklore amongst the students as something that had happened in the past and wasn’t going to happen again,’ said Capt. Shannon Trice of the Syracuse Police Department.

A junior marketing major who wished to remain anonymous described a similar feeling.

‘I was never really afraid of raids,’ said the junior, who has been going to several Marshall Street bars underage since her freshman year. ‘I never considered them a real threat.’

Shortly after midnight on Oct. 26, raids became a reality once again.

At about 12:30 a.m. that Friday, almost 100 underage students received citations in Operation Prevent raids of Lucy’s Retired Surfer Bar and Chuck’s Cafe.

At Lucy’s, police confiscated 45 fake IDs and issued an additional 39 underage drinking citations and two misdemeanor charges for serving to minors. At Chuck’s, police confiscated 13 fake IDs and issued four additional underage drinking citations and five misdemeanor charges for serving to minors.

The bars were chosen based on anonymous tips to the New York State Liquor Authority and Syracuse police, Trice said. About a month went into the planning of the raid.

And Trice warns that students should expect at least four more raids.

‘We will keep doing the raids,’ said Trice of Syracuse police’s traffic division. ‘We think it will reduce the amount of underage people (drinking).’

Operation Prevent was created in 2003 as a program to curb underage drinking in the university area. It was funded by the Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee with an original grant of $18,500 and an additional $4,000 grant in 2004.

Nine raids occurred and more than 250 IDs were confiscated as a part of Operation Prevent between February 2003 and February 2006. Two bars – Konrad’s and Planet 505 – closed as a result of the raids.

Prior to October’s raid, Operation Prevent had been dormant for 20 months after the state stopped funding the program. During the absence of raids, the program focused on sting operations at establishments selling liquor to minors, Trice said.

The recent resurgence was funded by the Onondaga District Attorney’s Office after SU presented the office with troubling statistics, Trice said. The district attorney’s office then contacted Syracuse police and asked it to reinstate Prevent raids of university area bars.

‘SU was seeing a lot of alcohol overdoses, and they wanted to address the problem,’ Trice said.

At the same time Prevent raids had ceased, SU was receiving statistics from the Office of Judicial Affairs showing at least a 55 percent increase in underage drinking and extreme intoxication cases in the past two years before this academic year. SU would not yet release last year’s official statistics.

General alcohol incidents – the unlawful use or possession of alcohol – as well as cases of extreme intoxication – when a student is intoxicated to the point where medical personnel become involved – were both on the rise:

      – During the 2003-04 academic year, 830 alcohol incidents and 58 cases of extreme intoxication were reported.

      – During the 2004-05 academic year, 946 alcohol incidents and 66 cases of extreme intoxication cases were reported.

      – During the 2005-06 academic year, 1,284 alcohol incidents and 88 cases of extreme intoxication were reported to Judicial Affairs.

SU was also receiving evidence that many of these cases were coming from bars, Trice said.

As director of the Office of Judicial Affairs, Rami Badawy helps to compile and examine these statistics. He could not yet provide official statistics for last year’s academic year, but said they are about the same as 2005-06’s numbers.

‘It was concerning that we saw the same trend going last year through the beginning of this semester,’ he said.

Despite the troubling statistics, SU officials told The Daily Orange in March that the university had no involvement in petitioning for a return of Operation Prevent.

‘No one at SU ever lobbied for Operation Prevent’s creation or continuation,’ said Matthew Snyder, director of communications and media relations for the Division of Student Affairs, in a March 2007 Daily Orange article.

Something changed.

Barry Weiss, who heads the district attorney’s Stop DWI program, said ‘a couple of people from the university approached the Stop DWI program’ in hopes the office could financially aid Operation Prevent.

The board voted to approve the request and now funds the Prevent raids through money raised from DWI arrest fines. Weiss would not provide the specific amount of money available except that it is enough ‘for several more raids.’

‘The board thought it was appropriate to step in where the state had in the past,’ Weiss said. ‘There is a law, and we have to enforce it.’

Judicial Affairs director Badawy could not pinpoint an exact time when SU officials discussed Operation Prevent resurgence with the district attorney’s office, but rather emphasized SU’s ‘longstanding relationships with both the district attorney’s office and other law enforcement agencies.’

‘We speak to the district attorney’s office all the time,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it is on a weekly basis.’

Judicial Affairs’ main involvement with Operation Prevent is handling punishment referrals for SU students cited in the raids, Badawy said.

Both Badawy and Syracuse police’s Trice emphasized that Prevent raids are an effort to help prevent unsafe situations for students, such as alcohol overdoses and sexual assault.

‘I have often said if people were responsible, there would be no reason for the police to be there,’ Trice said. ‘Unfortunately, these people are not responsible when they consume alcohol and they do foolish things, and it gets them into trouble.’

Trice said he hopes the raids will get some underage students to stop and think before they head down to Marshall Street.

And for at least for some underage students, a fear of raids has been instilled once again.

The anonymous junior expressed relief at not being at a bar the night of the raids, but said she was immediately concerned about possible future raids.

‘It made me anxious about the future of going to the bars because I’m not 21 for a few more months,’ she said.

She has since been to a Marshall Street bar once, but said she has not gone as much as she would have in the past. The time she did go, she noticed a much smaller crowd and stricter bouncers and bartenders.

‘People were getting ID’d at the bar, which I had never seen before,’ she said.

Upperclassmen have also noticed a decline in bar attendance.

Adam Hecht, 21, usually goes down to Marshall Street at least once a weekend. Lately, he said, the bars have been visibly less crowded.

‘Take last Thursday, for example,’ he said. ‘It was just pretty dead, compared to what it was like before the raids. I think the raids definitely scared people.’

But Hecht was confident the fear will eventually wear off. Not much can keep people from bars if they really want to go, he said.

‘They’ll start funneling in again,’ he said. ‘It takes time for the wounds to heal and for people to feel comfortable again to go and break the law.’

Published on November 14, 2007 at 12:00 pm