The Ithaca Police Department keeps the city’s inhabitants safe from an array of criminal minds. The press sometimes notices its work. On the local page of this weekend’s Ithaca Journal is a (side-lead) story about Lisa Nembhard, 44, whom police apprehended in the parking lot of CVS Pharmacy with over 100 bootlegged DVDs and CDs; this puts an end to “Lisa’s World”— a freefall of mendacity and home-labeled jewel cases. The District Attorney here recently dismissed drug charges against Robert Gelinas, 61, who had transferred his anti-anxiety medication from large prescription bottles to smaller, portable ones that did not have the pharmacy label. Gelinas learned his lesson: “Now I carry the original pill bottles with me in the car,” he said.
This invective against the Ithaca KGB was perhaps set off by the receipt of my sixth parking ticket in a year (Stewart Ave., 4:46 p.m., 28 minutes over), but it is an independent fact that I have never seen such an active police force in any other city. As a childhood teacher’s pet, I used to view authority figures as guardians; only since moving to Ithaca have I felt what it is like to live on the wrong side of the law, to feel the suspicious eye of the teacher bearing down on me.
The reach of the local police manifests itself in a number of subtle but palpable ways. Without fail, I am carded whenever I go out to restaurants or bars. The law says I must be, but what is surprising is the ardor and consistency with which that law is enforced. A restaurant here refused to serve a friend of mine alcohol because she had a passport but no driver’s license. As I see it, these actions represent a choice between making a good faith attempt to carry out the law and zealously pursuing the security that comes with irreproachability. It is the difference between airport security personnel making a 90-year-old woman in a wheelchair take off her oxygen tank to put it through the x-ray machine or letting her pass.
Last month The Ithacan reported on the rising number of citations issued for cell phone use while driving. Ithaca College senior Rick McGrath said he had been driving at 10 miles an hour on a campus “country road” when he received a ticket for talking on his cell phone — this as part of “No Tolerance Week,” a crackdown worthy of having been orchestrated in a high-tech control room two miles below ground. The fact that the parking and traffic situation in Ithaca is deplorable does not seem to spark sympathy in the police. I have been followed by police at night for no reason and paid nearly $100 in parking fines; I share the opinion of another student at Ithaca College, reported in The Ithacan, that police should not “nickel and dime us.”
The police department’s big three: citations for noise ordinance violations, public urination and trespassing into construction zones (considering that half of Cornell is under construction, this is neither surprising nor easy to avoid if you want to get to class on time). In 2002, the mayor even called an emergency meeting about the “quality of life” in Collegetown, in part spurred by an alarming spike in public urination.
With its focus on trivial crimes, the Ithaca and Cornell Police Departments resemble a babysitting service more than a police force. For all that is good, “progressive” and “sustainable” about Ithaca, the petty concerns of law enforcement here are enough to make me miss the libertarian West.
It is a fact of life in a rural college town: without urban problems, police departments focus on minor annoyances. Cornell — together with Harvard and Dartmouth — is among the safest of the Ivies with respect to violent crime rates in the surrounding county. In 2000, only 2.5 crimes per 100 people were reported in Tompkins County, compared with 4 in Providence, R.I. and New Haven, Conn. counties. According to 2004 Department of Education statistics compiled by IvyGate (a blog), Cornell only had three robberies that year, impressive for its size but also impressive given the fact that UPenn had 65 and Yale 38.
If anything serious happens, I will surely call the police and be thankful for their presence. But what I miss most about cities is precisely the noise and occasional public urination. This perhaps evinces a personal proclivity — one that ought not be generalized — for the grit and ugliness of cities, which suggest to me their indelible authenticity. It might have to do with being young too: I do not want to live in Celebration, Fl., the Disney-created community where the most subversive act is running afoul of the homeowner’s association by placing pink flamingos on the front yard.
Gabriel Arana is a graduate student in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at garana@cornellsun.com [1]. The Red Line appears Thursdays.
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[1] mailto:garana@cornellsun.com