Orientation Week is an unusual time at Cornell. The community welcomes an entirely new class of students; others move into their new residences; and eager freshmen await their first few days of college. Excitement and anticipation abound. Unfortunately, however, Orientation Week and the partying that comes with it, also incite a level of police presence sufficient for securing central Baghdad.

Anyone who ventured into Collegetown during “O-week” probably recalls seeing a police vehicle on nearly every street corner. The policemen were either questioning people who appeared troublesome or looking for more people to question. You might have even witnessed the police entering houses or chasing down exasperated undergraduates through narrow alleyways. Judging by the volume of resources devoted to patrolling Collegetown, it would seem the city was targeting some grave threat to its community. Apparently the grave threat is drunk college kids.

Every year, Cornell students are fined thousands of dollars during their first week at school for alcohol-related incidents and alleged noise violations. In the vast majority of instances, relatively well-meaning students are simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. An individual drinking Keystone Light in the hallway of his friend’s house poses no significant threat to society, and yet it is often these individuals who are apprehended. Sure, drinking alcohol under the age of 21 is technically illegal, but doesn’t it seem strange that the City of Ithaca would make such an enormous effort to incriminate its residents for behavior that is largely conventional and mostly harmless?

As far as I can tell, we have laws for two basic reasons: to reflect the moral fabric of citizens and to keep citizens safe without significantly restricting their freedoms. Hence, the law is meant “to serve and protect.” Much of the police activity in Collegetown during Orientation Week, I believe, did neither.

As for the first criterion, I doubt very much that preventing 18 to 20-year-olds from consuming alcohol is a legitimate moral concern of people anywhere (with the exception of religious beliefs, which should not influence the law), not to mention in Collegetown, where roughly 95 percent of the residents are themselves college students. The reality, however, is that student-tenants pay rent to landlords, who then pay taxes to the City of Ithaca, which then apparently employs otherwise-courageous police officers to slap over $100 fines on those same tenants.

Whether or not the enormous number of fines and drinking citations makes Collegetown any safer is a bit more contentious issue, and one that certainly warrants discussion. But while I agree that binge drinking has become a serious problem at many college campuses across the country, I find it hard to believe that creeping up on a drunk freshman urinating in a bush is going to make him drink more responsibly next time. Even if you do give him a hefty fine. Again, I’m not saying that alcohol in not dangerous, because it obviously can be; I’m saying that arresting people is not necessarily the most effective way of making alcohol safer.

Obviously, this problem is not specific to Ithaca, and the police have an obligation to enforce federal and state laws. But there is such a thing as over-enforcing a law, and that seems to be what is occurring in Collegetown. The importance of a local government is to account for the fact that the federal government may be out of touch with certain regions or communities. With this is mind, the Ithaca Police should accept the fact that there will always be drinking in Collegetown, and begin to focus their efforts on more threatening alcohol-related issues like drunk driving (not urinating freshmen).

Even more frustrating is that some policemen enter houses in ways that seem unlawful or even unconstitutional. Government officials cannot enter a private residence without a signed warrant, except in the case of extreme and immediate danger. In Collegetown, policemen often overstep this restriction by presenting the owner of the residence with a noise complaint, which purports that some other member of the community has been negatively affected by the noise in question. According to the City Code of Ithaca, noise complaints can be issued for the any noise deemed “excessive, unnecessary, unnatural or unusual” and which “are prolonged, unusual and unnatural in their time.”

What exactly this confounding piece of legal documentation expresses I’m not really sure. My guess is that it means policemen can inspect a house almost whenever they feel like it, since it is the cops themselves who seem to be filing the complaints. The apparent effect is that any time a cop hears even a faint trail of music as he creeps down College Ave., the ambiguity of the law gives him the right to enter the property, often in search of other possible violations.

I respect any individual who is willing to risk self-harm to serve the public, and that certainly includes the police. But the sort of police activity exhibited in Collegetown, particularly during Orientation Week, is itself “prolonged, excessive, and unusual,” and does more harm to Collegetown life than anything else.

Ben Notterman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at bnotterman@cornellsun.com. The Scorpion King will appear alternate Wednesdays this semester.