Penn, Temple Students Facing Underage Drinking Crackdown

This maybe isn’t a good time to be an alcohol-loving college student in Philadelphia. First, let’s see what’s going on at Penn:

The 2013 Annual Security & Fire Safety Report sent as an all-school email Tuesday morning showed a dramatically increased number of disciplinary referrals for liquor violations since 2009. The recent increase hit almost 50 percent.

Liquor Control Enforcement officers aren’t the only ones to look out for on Saturday nights. Disciplinary referrals for liquor law violations (that is, Penn investigating and possibly punishing independently of the police) went up — way up. In 2009, there were 166. By 2012, the number jumped up to 245, a nearly 50 percent increase. In better news, arrests for liquor law violations on campus haven’t shot up in the same way: in 2010 no one was arrested, in 2011, six were and in 2012 only two.

Enforcement is also increasing at Temple:

In the four weekends since school began, 270 students have met sobering ends after becoming the latest recipients of alcohol-related citations due to a new push by the university to subdue party-related chaos.

During the first three weeks last year, only six were cited for alcohol.

“We never had a lot of activity the first two weekends of school,” Charlie Leone, acting executive director of Campus Safety Services, said.

A lot of the busts at Temple are non-students partying on campus, it turns out:

He added that almost half of alcohol-related arrests have been on non-Temple students.

“We used to be somewhere around 20–25 percent [of non-Temple students cited for alcohol], then we got up to 30 percent, and now this year about 50 percent,” he said. “So, half of the people that were cited, that were stopped, that were involved in alcohol issues and things of that nature had nothing to do with the university.”