Party Permit?

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Meadow Street Mayhem last Spring
The Safe & Healthy Neighborhood working group is furiously formulating a rental registration and permitting system bylaw for approval at the Annual Spring Town Meeting, to deal with that age old blight on Amherst residential neighborhoods -- the Party House. 

One of the other ideas being worked on (hopefully not too hard)  is a joint effort of the town and UMass to have students pre-register off campus parties.  Presumably if a party gets out of hand, the police will be a tad more accommodating because at least the party hosts had registered the event.

But if police are called to the atypical rowdy party going full blast and the hosts have not registered the event, then police will be a little harder on the perpetrators, and have one more charge to add to the roster. 

The latter will of course be the norm.
 
Some states have tried to "tax" illegal marijuana over the years by requiring dealers to pre purchase "tax stamps" for their contraband.  If cops bust a dealer without the stamps then officials can seize their personal property, or something like that.

It doesn't work very well.  Amazingly.

Kind of like trying to keep guns out of the hands of pernicious perps. Whatever rules you impose on the vast majority of law abiding citizens will be ignored by the wackos or hard core criminals.

And it only takes one of them to do astounding damage.

With "party registrations" Chief Livingstone recently told the Amherst Zoning Board, "I'm guessing we're heading in that direction".  But he was quick to add it should be overseen by the Dean of Students office because he didn't think the students would voluntarily come to the Amherst Police Department to register their event.

Safe bet.


 Sober Shuttle for one 2/17 1:22 AM
Perhaps a reason why the 'Sober Shuttle' in downtown Amherst seems to be having a hard time attracting a whole lot of student ridership:  the presence of a uniformed UMPD officer.

Early Sunday morning the 1:20 AM shuttle had only one rider and the 2:00 AM shuttle, if it did show up, would have had zero.