In Trinity Park, it's Duke to the resue

Editorial

It's coming eight months later than planned, but on Wednesday Duke University police officers will at last begin patrolling neighborhoods and commercial areas adjacent to the East Campus. This $300,000-a-year project in cooperation with the Durham Police Department (similar to an existing arrangment with the N.C. Central University police), bids to become another excellent example of town-gown cooperation.

And the patrols are getting underway only three days before thousands of students return to Duke for the 2004-2005 academic year. You could almost hear the sighs of relief in Trinity Park, where student parties last year -- more knee-walking-drunk debauchery than parties, according to one resident -- led to so many complaints that Durham police started citing students for violating the city's noise ordinance.

Those episodes gave rise to a law passed by the General Assembly in 2003 giving Duke police authority to patrol off campus. In fact, the law gives Duke police arrest powers anywhere in Durham.

But it's the mostly middle-class neighborhoods adjacent to East Campus that will get the most attention from the Duke officers. That's because some party-loving Duke students have begun renting houses in these neighborhoods as a result of the university's crackdown on alcohol abuse on campus.

By the middle of last year, the situation in Trinity Park had reached Animal House status. Duke history professor Gunther Peck's experience was typical of complaints streaming into the Durham Police Department and Duke. Peck told The Herald-Sun's Hunter Lewis that it was bad enough to look out his window at 1 o'clock in the morning to see a soused Dukie urinating on his house, but what really sent Peck's ire meter to the top was all the drunken driving and vomiting in the streets.

The wonder of it all, of course, is that nobody has died from alcohol poisoning or a traffic accident as a consequence of these binges.

Fortunately, the arrival of a police cruiser tends to concentrate the mind of most people who are sobriety-challenged. Now, when that cruiser wears the livery of Duke University, Duke students will have good reason to think hard and long about the disciplinary hangovers that come from offenses against the public order.

In addition to patrolling nearby neighborhoods, as well as the commercial areas of Ninth and Broad streets, the Duke officers will act as a force multiplier for the Durham Police Department. We hope some of its officers will be assigned to crime-plagued East Durham and other parts of the city that need a more sustained police presence.

Anyone calling 911 from the East Campus area will get the customary response. But the officers and their cruisers may be from Duke, not the city.

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