STAFF EDITORIAL: Downtown cops should stay put

One a.m., O Street. If you’ve been there, you know.

Boozed-up bar-goers – often University of Nebraska-Lincoln students – gradually exit their favorite drinking establishments.

Talking, smoking, often staggering, they make their way home or gravitate to the nearest available gyro or taco vendor.

And dotted in the crowd is a strong police presence, where cop cars add their flashing lights to the mix.

Students often complain about getting undeservedly heckled by Lincoln police, or tell tales of cops aggressively questioning or following them as they make their way down the block.

True though some of these reports may be, the law enforcement presence is comforting when a scuffle breaks out (as it sometimes does) or when women have to walk alone to nearby cars or apartments (as they usually do).

Lincoln Police Chief Tom Casady, members of the Lincoln City Council and a number of students acknowledge that a squad of officers are a good buffer against a lawless drunken riot.

But Casady and some council members see a problem with the situation: the band of police officers keeping the peace at 1 a.m. could be patrolling elsewhere in the city.

Casady and other officers suggested the council try to limit the number of liquor licenses sold downtown. If bars were distributed across the city, O Street wouldn’t see such mobs and wouldn’t need so many cops.

We suppose it’s good to have cops rolling around Lincoln, looking for fights, watching for DWIs … but then, isn’t that exactly what they do on O Street? And if the bar network was stretched over the city, wouldn’t cops have to be stretched out as well?

If there’s a concentration of bars, there’s a concentration of perpetrators, too. It’s probably as easy or easier to catch DWIs when they’re all leaving from the same place. Easier to spot potential fights if they’re right in front of police, and easier to stop them when the police are so visibly present.

Besides, as many students in the Daily Nebraskan’s Tuesday article so astutely mention, the downtown concentration prevents many students from drunkenly driving from distant bar to distant bar.

Many students live near the bars – those bar-goers weaving their way home don’t seem so dangerous when you think they could be on the road.

Right now, police have to deal with several hours’ worth of crowd control three nights a week. To us, the students who enjoy their O Street fun and appreciate officers’ protection, the situation doesn’t really need fixing.