The Free Press rode along with USM Police Officer Russ Swann last Friday night to get a look at how alcohol laws are enforced on the Gorham campus.
To protect the identities of students involved, all names have been omitted.
It’s a little after 11 pm the night before Halloween on the Gorham campus and I’m sitting in the front seat of an unmarked police car while a girl dressed like a cop stands shivering outside in the light rain, her mascara running.
The "cop" is with two friends. One girl – a UNE student – isn’t wearing a costume. The other is wearing a little black dress and Chuck Taylors. She’s dressed up as Bella Cullen from Twilight, she says later.
Bella Cullen and the cop have been drinking.
Next to me in the driver’s seat is an actual cop, Officer Russ Swann of the USM Police. The girls aren’t Gorham residents. He’s on the radio with Gorham dispatch, running their names. He gets out of the car, and presses Bella for identification. She has none.
"I really don’t have an ID," Bella Cullen says. "I’ve never had a driver’s license. I have my debit card," she adds, questioning whether that would help.
Swann eventually lets them go after talking to Bella’s dad on her cell phone. Her dad says she was born in August of 1988, but Bella says her birthday is April of the same year. With no other way to confirm her age, Swann lets them go. He later admits he wasn’t sure if it was really her father. but he wasn’t going to push the issue.
Swann tells them they can stay on campus, but they have to be with their host "at all times."
"I don’t want you driving," he adds.
"We won’t," they say in a chorus.
"It’s my forte"
A major part of Swann’s job on the Gorham campus is liquor enforcement. "It’s my forte," he says in the station before we leave for patrol. For Swann, busting kids drinking doesn’t satisfy a predatory urge; he doesn’t especially relish ruining parties or making 18 year-old girls cry. But it’s part of his job. And he’s good at it.
During the patrol, we drive in a constant loop through campus. Anytime we pass a group of students, he slows a little to watch the way they walk, looking for the telltale stagger; keeping an eye out for a bottle in someone’s hand.
Swann, 32, of Standish, has been an officer at USM for about five years. Before that, he was a firefighter and EMT in Windham. Prior to that, he was a Hull Technician in the Navy, where he eventually became part of a crew that boarded drug-smuggling ships in international waters.
"Each one of us has a certain thing that we develop and hone our skills in on. My thing is liquor enforcement. OUIs, furnishing liquor to minors, furnishing a place to consume alcohol," he says.
Swann says the 14 years he worked as an EMT in Windham is part of the reason he’s so strict about alcohol on campus.
"During my duty time with them, I saw a lot of accidents involving liquor," he says. "My first accident I went to at 16 years old was a mother and her two children. It was during the day. The driver that had hit them had gone through the windshield and hit a tree and actually got up and walked away from it. The mother and children passed away. So, to me, that’s an important factor."
When Swann is out on patrol, he’s always on the lookout for drunk drivers.
"We look for a lot of different things when we’re looking to stop a vehicle for OUI," he says.
If a driver weaves or jerks, Swann pulls them over. If they drive too fast, he’ll pull them over. If they drive exactly the speed limit, it arouses his suspicion and he’ll often follow them. So what is the right speed to drive?
"There isn’t," he laughs.
Swann isn’t deluded about his job. He acknowledges that college kids are going to drink or smoke weed. He doesn’t expect to stop all partying on campus. But that doesn’t stop him from trying.
"I can’t say that we’re fine with it," he says. "We understand they’re away from mom and dad, we understand they want to have a good time. And we try not to discourage them from having a good time. Of course we have to uphold the law."
"The biggest problem that we’ve noticed with a lot of the students is that they draw attention to themselves," he continues. "They’ll come up from one of the fraternities and they’ll be practically falling down, or something to that effect. Or we get called to a room because somebody passed out in somebody’s room and they don’t know why they’re in their room. Some go beyond the norm and just get too belligerent."
When he knows an underage student has been drinking, Swann tries to get them to admit it.
"Some of the students won’t – they’ll fight me on it," he says.
If they admit it, he notes it in his report that they took responsibility for their actions.
But that doesn’t mean he goes easy on them. Anyone under the age of 21 who smells like liquor, fails a field sobriety test or admits to having drank is summoned to appear in Portland Superior Court.
If they won’t admit it, Swann does a Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus (HGN) test on them. He shines a flashlight in their face and holds his index finger in front of their eyes, moving it horizontally. If their eyes shake involuntarily, they’re drunk.
He also tries to get them to say where they got the booze.
Watch your step
A little past midnight, we drive past a couple walking on College Avenue. Swann watches them in the rearview mirror. The girl stumbles. Swann pulls a U-turn. He hits the lights and pulls over on the side of the road.
The girl is dressed like a french maid, her boyfriend has a fake beergut. They’re underage.
After performing an HGN test on them, Swann determines they’ve been drinking. He calls in their names to dispatch. He writes up summonses for them in the car, then gets out and hands them the tickets.
The french maid starts crying.
"I’ve never been in trouble, ever," she sobs.
Swann asks where had been drinking.
"I really can’t tell you where we were," the boyfriend says.
Swann asks where they got the booze.
"It was just some random guy," the maid says.
"That’s all you can give me?" Swann asks.
"Running makes it worse"
Swann likes his job for a couple of different reasons: he likes to help people, and he enjoys interacting with students.
Some nights, instead of wearing a badge and patrolling in a cruiser, he walks around the campus in plain clothes. He talks to students about classes, and asks how their night is going. Swann is a college student himself; he takes classes at Husson College, where he’s working on a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.
Dressing down gives Swann the chance to talk to students who otherwise would be intimidated by the badge, flashing lights and Glock.
"A lot of people freak out, they see the uniform and run. Why? I don’t know," he says.
"Running makes it worse."
"Nice friends"
It’s around 1 a.m. and we’re on University Way at the stop sign in front of Bailey and Russell Halls. A black Saab pulls up and a girl jumps out. She jogs to the cruiser and asks Swann for help. Her friend is drunk, and she’s not responding.
Swann hits the ligh
ts
, gets out of the car and walks to the driver’s side, where a 19-year-old girl in the backseat is sitting slumped forward, her face buried inside a yellow nylon lunch box that’s partially filled with vomit.
A girl in the seat next to her is rubbing her back and hair, trying to coax the alcohol from her body.
"I got a call to come pick her up," the driver says. The girl had been partying somewhere off of Brighton Avenue in Portland, she says. Neither she nor the other two friends knew where the girl had been partying, or how much she had drank.
"They just tossed her off to you?" Swann asks in disbelief. "Nice friends."
Swann calls dispatch and requests an ambulance. In what seems like seconds, Gorham Police Sgt. Mike Nolt arrives, followed by paramedics.
After Swann fills in the three EMTs on the girl’s condition, they unload a gurney from the ambulance and roll it over to the car, where he and two EMTs pick up the girl and hoist her onto the bed. Her head slides off the pillow and flops to the side as they roll her to the ambulance. Her mouth is moving, speaking soundless words as if talking in a dream.
This scenario is slightly horrifying if you’re not used to seeing someone with alcohol poisoning. But Swann sees it all the time.
"We get two to three of these a night, some nights," Swann says.
"A summons in this case doesn’t seem so important," he adds.
"She’s gonna have a hell of a hangover in the morning."
Quality time
We’re patrolling the G13 parking lot at around 2 in the morning. Swann has five hours left on his shift. We pass a parked SUV with its brake lights on. It’s the second time in an hour we’ve passed the same car. He gets out, walks along the driver’s side and holds his hand against the brakelight for a moment before approaching the driver.
He talks with the man behind the wheel for a few minutes, then walks back to the car to call in the names of the driver and his girlfriend.
Swann tells me the driver was "exposed" when he walked up. Dispatch confirms the identities of the driver and his girlfriend. There are no warrants, and the car is legal.
"I’m gonna give him a verbal warning for exposing his tally-wanker," he tells me. "But technically it’s a criminal offense so he could be arrested for it."
He performs an HGN test on the driver. He had been drinking, but Since Swann never saw him drive the car, he can’t bust him for operating under the influence.
"In order for me to prove operation, I had to have seen movement, or for the car to be in gear," he says.
Swann says the driver told him he and his girlfriend got back from Portland an hour before. His roommate was home, so they stayed in the car to get some privacy.
Had his foot not been on the brake the whole time, it’s unlikely Swann would have even noticed them.
Swann gives the driver a ticket.
The driver holds his hand out to shake. Swann refuses.
"I don’t shake hands," he says. "Nothing against you."
"I never thought badly of you"
We’re by the soccer field when a group of people walk by. Swann yells out the window, "Hey! What are you doing?"
A girl walks down the hill to the car. Swann had arrested her some time ago. He won’t say exactly what for, but it involved alcohol.
She tells him what’s happened since the night he arrested her. She knows she made a mistake, she says. She’s going to court in November. She’s willing to take responsibility for what she did.
"I never thought badly of you as a person," he explains. "I’ll do what I can to help."
Conversations like these are an example of why Swann does his job. Despite the fact that most USM students see campus police as a "necessary evil," as he calls it, some dorm residents understand that campus police are there for a reason.
"This is an individual who I arrested and is acting like I’m their best friend," he says.
"It makes me feel good that they understand."