This year has been a roller coaster ride for Hanover Police alcohol policy. After unveiling a proposal for "sting operations" in February and backpedaling several days later, Hanover Police Chief Nicholas Giaccone announced last week that police officers will no longer automatically arrest underage, intoxicated students who are taken to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Instead, they will give students seven days to enroll in the Alcohol Diversions Program, and only after a failure to do so will a citation be recorded on students' records ("Police shift policy on arrests for drinking," April 16). In less than three months, Hanover Police has seemingly gone from enforcement zealot to benevolent caretaker.
Giaccone and the Hanover Police should be applauded for this reversal. Their decision has removed a fundamental contradiction in the Good Samaritan Policy, which was created to provide a way for dangerously intoxicated students to seek medical attention without fear of legal consequences. Arresting students who needed medical attention undermined the essential premise of the Good Sam program.
Under Hanover Police's former policy, seeking help meant taking a gamble: Dick's House might be able to provide sufficient care, in which case the protections of Good Sam would apply. If more intensive care was required, however, the resulting visit to DHMC practically guaranteed an arrest for underage drinking. The result was a paradoxical situation in which the more intoxicated students were, the stronger the motivation was to avoid making a Good Sam call.
In practice, Hanover Police's new policy is not hugely different from its old policy, which allowed students to enroll in Diversions and expunge the arrest from their records. However, to students accustomed to being on the right side of the law, the prospect of being arrested was incredibly intimidating and far more deterring than any of the other consequences associated with seeking medical attention. Without having to significantly alter their enforcement policy, Hanover Police has changed the way students perceive the consequences of making a Good Sam call.
Although Hanover Police's new policy is a positive step, we must understand that Hanover Police's actions are only one factor in a complex decision-making process that students go through when choosing whether to call help for themselves or their friends. By nature of their choice to consume alcohol at extreme levels, binge drinkers can be called risk takers. Risk takers, especially intoxicated ones, when faced with the inconvenience of a visit to the hospital, are more likely to take another gamble and go home to sleep off their intoxication, or to allow their more intoxicated friends to do the same. Even if the friends of a student who has over-imbibed are thinking clearly, the potential hospital and ambulance bills, as well as the cost of the Diversions program, are enough to discourage rational thinkers from calling for help.
On the other hand, some students say they have noticed a recent trend toward greater willingness to make Good Sam calls, suggesting that prioritizing safety over potential consequences has become a stronger norm ("Drinking stagnates, students say," March 5). Encouraging this tendency could be the most effective strategy for improving the chances that dangerously intoxicated students will receive medical attention.
Focusing only on Hanover Police's actions distracts from the capacity that students have for effecting positive change among their peers. The decision to call for help ultimately rests with students, and overemphasizing Hanover Police's policies obscures our own accountability. If students are going to demand that Hanover Police put safety before punishment, they must demand the same priorities from themselves, by making the potentially life-saving call regardless of the consequences.
Hanover Police policy will always be beyond the control of the student body. We can encourage Hanover Police to take steps that promote student safety, and we can applaud when they do so, but our ability to impact policy is ultimately limited. Our efforts would be far more effective if we focused on something we can control: our own behavior. Creating a culture in which safety comes before all other considerations, friends cut each other off when they've had enough, and drinking to the point of imminent death is not socially acceptable, will do far more for safety than lobbying Hanover Police to decrease the penalties for underage drinking.