Excise police initiates program

Friday night, three Bloomington High School North students walked up to two men outside a CVS and asked the men to buy them alcohol.

The men were plainclothes officers with the Indiana State Excise Police.

The students seemed not to see the other minors dumping more than $180 of alcohol and being served with tickets for illegal possession of alcohol and possession of a false ID by the officers.

Officers said the students had already been drinking, had told the officers they had run out of alcohol and offered $20 for a bottle of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum.

The officers called the parents of the BHSN students, aged 16 and 17, and had the parents pick them up from the CVS parking lot.

That same night, Excise police officers issued 64 alcohol-related tickets in a crackdown effort on underage drinking in college cities in Indiana.

The program, which involves more plainclothes officers at bars and liquor stores, as well as patrols looking for noise complaints and underage drinking parties, started Feb. 6. and will run through the rest of spring semester.

“We want people to know we are out there,” Excise police Cpl. Travis Thickstun said. “They’re doing what they did before and adding more.”

The effort will be concentrated in three communities in the state — Bloomington, Muncie and Greencastle — and Thickstun said it is intended to deter surveys that say 57 percent of underage students drank in the 30 days before the survey.

“What we want is that number to go down,” he said.

Thickstun said it is a little early to gauge the effectiveness of the program, but between more plainclothes officers on the street and more patrols around town, at least 300 tickets have been issued in Bloomington alone.

“We are doing lots of different things, all with the same goal,” Thickstun said. “The goal is not just an increase in tickets and arrests. The goal is a change in
behavior.”

— Charles Scudder