Madison Police officers raided a bar on the 600 block of State Street Sept. 1, resulting in over 100 underage drinking citations for the bar’s patrons.
An unnamed source identified the bar to the Wisconsin State Journal as State Street’s City Bar, though MPD and UWPD did not confirm this.
The Madison Police Department raided the bar alongside the University of Wisconsin Police Department. Out of the 143 people in the bar, only six of them were 21 years of age or older, according to an MPD incident report.
Consuming alcohol while underage is illegal in the State of Wisconsin and a violation of the UW System Administrative Code, according to the UW student sanctions information website.
MPD spokesperson and Officer Hunter Lisko said the overwhelming percentage of underage patrons at the bar was unusual, despite the drinking culture at UW.
“To see a number this big was definitely a statistical outlier on the number of bar checks that we conduct over the course of a year,” Lisko said. “We have officers doing bar checks very regularly, but few of them result in these kinds of numbers.”
A survey of undergraduate students at UW by University Health Services found that 85% of students reported consuming alcohol and 54% reported binge drinking, which is classified as consuming five or more drinks in one sitting.
Manager of SconnieBar on Regent Street Lucas Simon-Wambach said police presence in downtown bars is important to ensure that safety is the priority.
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“We’ve had emails back and forth with the police district here, and have definitely built a relationship with them,” Simon-Wambach said. “We’ve been able to feel like we’re all on the same team, just trying to make sure everybody going out to bars is staying safe while doing so.”
Simon-Wambach said him and his team work to maintain a productive and professional connection with law enforcement to keep everything running smoothly.
Despite this relationship, Simon-Wambach said he was shocked by the citation rates of the recent raid.
“That number of people at one time in the raid is higher than I’ve ever seen over the years,” Lucas Simon-Wambach said. “It definitely is an eye-opener for us.”
Owner and CEO of Madison, Middleton and Sun Prairie Nitty Gritty locations Eric Suemnicht said most bar owners and managers in the downtown area have learned to expect police checks in the early fall.
As students return to campus, underage drinking is closely monitored in the fall, according to Suemnicht.
“Most of us have been doing this for quite a while and we know that it’s not uncommon for the police to do these sorts of visits at the start of the school year,” Suemnicht said. “This is just a thing that happens every year.”
Though Suemnicht said police checks are more common in the fall, there are no MPD police reports from the past two years about bar checks that resulted in extensive citations.
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Simon-Wambach said fake IDs are a source of concern and, sometimes, the root of underage drinking. Fake IDs have gotten more sophisticated and harder to spot in the past several years, according to Simon-Wambach.
SconnieBar has made security updates since the raid, Simon-Wambach said, and they have started to train staff differently in order to prevent underage hopefuls from getting in with fake IDs.
“We’ve moved some of our cameras around, things like that, just to make sure that we’re staying on top of those things,” Simon-Wambach said. “We’re training our staff more, going into it as far as things to look for, checking for a second form [of identification].”
Moving forward, Simon-Wambach said this security and training will help address safety concerns surrounding alcohol.
Lisko is also hopeful continued patrolling will encourage healthy behavior around alcohol in the campus area.
“I’m sure this kind of enforcement in ensuring that bars are serving safely and that individuals are consuming alcohol safely is going to continue well into the future,” Lisko said.
