Those dreaded red plastic cups...
Posted on 06/07/2005 3:21:33 PM PDT by tgslTakoma
Anna Phelan and Emily Adams wanted to end their four years at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School with a memorable backyard graduation party.
There was a blues band, a moon bounce, a popcorn machine and a pit for making s'mores. Guests feasted on hot dogs, hamburgers and bratwurst. There was plenty of ginger ale, cranberry juice and root beer to go around. What there wasn't plenty of was alcohol.
"It was pretty low-key, and it was just sweet," Margaret Engel Adams, Emily's mother, said of the party for about 80 friends and relatives. "It was just pretty much out of Norman Rockwell."
All that changed about 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Adams said, when a Montgomery County police officer knocked on the Phelans' door, in the 4600 block of Rosedale Avenue in Bethesda, to say that someone had complained about the noise. The officer then asked Anna's mother, Kathy Phelan, if he and several other officers could give breath tests to the teenagers. She refused.
So police stationed patrol cars at each end of her street, six in all, and began giving the tests to guests as they left the party, she said. None of the teenagers tested positive for alcohol, she said.
Officers then began ticketing vehicles parked outside the Phelans' house, she said, including ones that belonged to neighbors who weren't at her party. Some vehicles were ticketed for a wheel improperly touching a curb or for extending into a driveway. Emily Adams, 18, received a $35 parking ticket; her Honda Odyssey minivan was parked directly in front of the Phelans' home.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Your papers are not in order! You will come with me please!
So the captain hasn't read "PR for Dummies" either.
A smart person planning a big party does call the local smokies to prevent problems. Doesn't hurt to find out about possible parking violations either. Same for big weddings or big funerals, espicially if you will need traffic control.
A smart person realizes that a party with 80 guests in a residential area on a weeknight may cause complaints and plans for ways to ameliorate them. Most grown-ups have to go to work the next day.
That said, this police capt. and team are really, really bad at community relations. They deserve the sh!tstorm they are getting, no doubt about that.
And why are they going to believe the people that register? Sounds like that would be a guarantee the cops will bust the party.
I'm off to the gulag now for improper sentence formation while posting to FR.
A smart cop will realize that if they go to the home and a parent answers the door, the chances that there are drugs or alchohol being served at the property have probably just decreased 90%.
We had tons of keg parties in Montgomery County. 99% of them were in the boonies.
Sorry, these cops got a bad tip, acted stupid and are now trying to cover it all up.
the cops may have overdone, but that high school has lost a lot of teens over the years to drunk driving and I don't know how cops are supposed to figure out which parties have drinking and which don't. If the party was so Norman ROckwellian, then why did the mother refuse some random tests? Just let them do it and move on to some place where the kids ARE drinking.
Kinda like voluntary firearm registration.
I come from 3 generations of NYC cops and there is no way in heck I would defend what these thugs did.
"He said it is standard procedure for alcohol enforcement officers to cordon off a block if they are denied access to a property where they suspect underage drinking is happening"
Kooky! I'd be embarrassed to be a cop. I mean an "alcohol enforcement officer".
I grew up in the Montgomery County boonies. You speak the truth. Although cops were cooler in the 1970's. I was once a passenger in car that was pulled over in the Damascus shopping center - we had both been drinking (I was 15 at the time) but were not royally wasted - the cops poured out our remaining beer and Boones Farm Strawberry Hill and sent us on our way. We thought that was very cool at the time but now as an adult I am not sure that was such a great idea.
99% of keggers everywhere are in the boonies. And 99% of the booze was purchased by adults with the intent of providing it to minors.
A parent answering the door does not decrease the odds 90%, IMO. More like 50%. I have no problem with the cordon and breath checks, they had complaints.
It's the parking tickets that they should be raked over the coals for, that's just jackboot thuggery. Instead of playing CYA they should make the tickets go away, apologize and publicly thank the parents for being responsible party givers.
But I gotta tell ya, that if my neighbors held an 80 guest party with a live band on a weeknight I'd tell them next time rent a venue.
Yup. If the kids hadn't had any interaction with the police before, they certainly have now. It's important to teach young people to loath and despise the police department.
And no, I'm not being sarcastic.
Well, excuse me Officer Fife, sir; but it seems that the parents did OK without your tips, and that's what's got your panties in a bunch. For crying out loud, I think we have entirely too many "elite" groups of cops trained to handle everything from red plastic cup parties to illegal alien rallies, and not enough doing old-fashioned police work. You know, catching members of MS13 before they hack another person to death, rape another woman in an apartment laundry room, etc.
Montgomery County has been a limosine liberal plantation for way too long, with numbskulls like Doug Duncan, Chief Charles Moose, and now PD Chief Manger deciding what laws to enforce and what to ignore (so as not to "offend" a core liberal constituency).
"The officers were part of an Alcohol Enforcement Section that combs the county around holidays and during prom season to guard against underage drinking. The eight-officer unit checks bars and restaurants and responds to citizen complaints when house parties appear to involve underage drinking."
This special Alcohol Enforcement Section guards aginst underage drinking by writing parking tickets? And in a residential community of single-family homes?! WTF?! Are we going to have LEOs patrolling the suburbs looking for residential parking violations now? Heck, I've got a neighbor that always parks facing the wrong direction for his side of the street, I'm sure that's gotta be worth atleast a weekend lock up and a $100 fine! Heh, heh, heh... that'll teach him to leave that fricken halogen spotlight on all night...
In virtually all cases I tend to side with the LEOs, they have a tough job and I'm all for a team to focus on underage drinking. What can I say? I'm a parent of a 17 and 14 year old. But this is an abuse of power. They can spin it anyway they want, the officers in this case wrote those tickets out of spite, pure and simple. While I don't think the families have a winnable lawsuit and I can't see a county firing officers for this, nothing less than public apologies, dismissed tickets and a couple of suspensions are due.
"I don't like the idea of the police spying on partygoers. It's one thing to observe people staggering out of the house, but none of this peeking over fences and looking around buildings trying to find laws being broken."
And then the police scratch their heads and wonder why everyone hates them. It all comes down to their leadership. If the bosses didn't say this way ok they wouldn't be doing it.
Me too. There are several of us on here from Montgomery County, btw.
I once had a cop find a case of beer in my car (unopened). He had pulled me over and saw the case sitting behind the driver's seat. He reminded me of the drinking age in Maryland (18) and sent me on my way.
There is a huge gap between letting a 17yo keep a case of beer and shutting down a street and acosting people to try and force them to take breathalyzer tests. If they are in their car with key in the ignition - that's fine. Walking down the street the cops should bugger off.
They could have taken dozens of 8 x 10 glossy photos of red cups littering the tables and trashcans throught the property. Instead they had to ticket practically every auto on the street, for wheels touching the curb, left wheels curbside, vehicle parked within 7' (or 5', or whatever the regs specify) of a driveway.
Well, at least nobody was cited for mopery.
Or were they?
Those dreaded red plastic cups...
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