Mifflin happened this weekend; it looked a lot different than it has in the past, but we still had a pretty good time. It bugs the crap out of me that the city gets to call it a huge success and act like they beat back the menace that is a co-ed with a beer in hand, but for the most part, things got better.
As much as I have loved the actual block party, it was ultimately too much of a logistical problem for the police to actively maintain it safely. For the most part, what I saw yesterday was a good end to the idea of moving away from the block itself and toward people choosing to go to house parties around the city. Couple that with the new option of Revelry and the always-available bars, and there was plenty going on to ease the sting of losing the block party.
My biggest problem was the way the day was policed. Now there is going to be a low number of tickets from police on Saturday and that is great, but my personal experience with outdoor drinking and how the police handled it was beyond reasonable.
I was at a party on Henry Street in the backyard of a house. It wasn’t a big party, and it certainly wasn’t a loud party – one keg, a couple of speakers and maybe 20 people. If this same party had been going on during a football Saturday, it wouldn’t have even been noticed. Yet there they were, at least six cops, telling the house owners they had to break the party up or get a noise citation.
Those kind of actions, which we were supposed to accept as necessary to maintain safety, happened at the small gatherings all over the city. And yet even that wasn’t a good enough line for the city. On a sunny, 70-degree Saturday afternoon, if your party wasn’t crammed inside of an apartment or house, you were inevitably going to have to deal with the police like you were doing something wrong. Any refusal to immediately shut down would be ticketed. Hell, some people got tickets for shutting down right away anyway.
I’m kind of stuck on that, but hopefully with a weekend Soglin can call a tremendous victory, the city will back off a bit next year. They have proven their point: The passage of the nuisance party ordinance, arbitrarily enforceable noise violations and underage drinking gave them all the tools to crack down on us. Yet now that the 20,000 person block parties seem to be a thing of the past, it would be very nice to see the city go back to treating students the first weekend in May the way they treat us the other 51 weekends of the year. The positive relationship and mutual respect between students and the police on this campus shouldn’t take a weekend off because people want to drink outside.
Stay out of our homes and backyards unless there is actually a problem. Communicate with students instead of threatening them, and don’t pretend that a couple speakers outside on a Saturday in Madison is illegal.
Other than that, I think the new look works. People have more choices, and the spread out nature will help keep out-of-towners from having a central, overcrowded and difficult to control location to invade.
We had fun Saturday, and there were no major incidents – for me, that was always going to be a success for the day. But for next year and beyond, I just hope the city doesn’t keep finding arbitrary reasons to prevent kids from using their property how they want one day a year.
Mayor Soglin will call this weekend a victory, but to me it is the students who deserve the applause. We were the ones who found our traditions changed and threatened and, with all eyes on us, still had a good time and stayed safe. Almost like we are responsible adults at one of the best universities in the world.
Oh wait.
John Waters ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism.
