With Madison the site of another college football game day, the Madison Police Department crashed a total of 26 parties this past weekend.
Twenty-four of the parties were broken up Saturday, the same day the Wisconsin Badgers played a game at Camp Randall Stadium, and two occurred Friday, according to Ald. Scott Resnick, District 8.
Resnick first tweeted the numbers Sunday night after totaling the amount from a feed of all the instant police reports.
Streets such as Bowen Court, College Court, Breese Terrace, University Avenue and Langdon Sreet, among others, were sites of broken up parties Saturday, according to the list of calls Resnick provided.
Resnick said he plans to track these numbers over the course of game days in Madison to see if there are correlations, increases or decreases in the numbers.
Resnick said this will prove whether the outreach methods are working for the police.
“The police are pretty good about whose house parties are being broken up,” Resnick said.
MPD Lt. Dave McCaw said Breese Terrace, Regent Street and Landgon Street were the main focuses to police due to the locations’ popularities for house parties. McCaw said the department does this every year at the beginning of the semester.
The three areas had four to six police officers and one sergeant on patrol. The police were looking for illegal or unruly house parties, he added.
Resnick stressed safety is the main concern when the police are breaking up a house party. Most house parties on campus never have problems, he added.
Resnick didn’t have numbers to compare to from over the years, but he noted this year is very different from any other year in that the police department is being very open about where officers have visited.
“Their [MPD’s] goal is compliance as opposed to writing as many underages as possible,” he said.
Resnick said he hopes to introduce an initiative at the city level to make these police reports public so students can see where officers are, where there are parties and how many house parties are being broken up.
