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Here’s an unlikely hip-hop music video which begins with Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Jamie Foxx, and Ron Howard showing up together at a party. Samuel L. Jackson is already there, chilling with a young woman whose boobs are hanging out. The party is off the hook, there’s even a man wearing a giant panda head. At one point, Ron Howard raises up his champagne glass in unison with the others, while dollar bills flutter down from the ceiling.
A Minnesota House bill introduced by Reps. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis; Chris DeLaForest, R-Andover; Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, and Leon Lillie, DFL-North St. Paul, seeks to lower the minimum drinking age to 18 for the purchase of alcohol at establishments holding liquor licenses. Critics of the proposed shift argue that binge-drinking and drunk-driving would only increase, but don’t recognize the combination of psychological reactance and alcohol expectations as active forces behind current underage drinking behavior.
I’m not quite sure why who thought this story about busting underage drinkers would be positive for advertising the use of a police department’s resources, especially when coming across parts like this:
Because police didn’t have a specific address, officers had to search for the party. About 2 a.m., they found it in the 1100 block of Lockridge Avenue South.
“We had officers on patrol … going to specific neighborhoods,” McCarthy said.
Is there honestly nothing better to do than to track down and cite 33 people for Minor In Possession of alcohol (~$200 fine) on a Saturday night at closing time off in Cottage Grove? Clearly not, as evident by the party-goers thumbing their nose at the cops, refusing to let them in, and forcing them to get a search warrant before they would let them indoors.
As a life-time resident of the city of Minneapolis, refusing to let the police inside my house, while entirely within my legal rights, sounds completely foreign. The MPD are heavyweights, and they do not play around– it’s just got to be much easier to have the underage drinkers hide or scatter off into the night than to refuse entry to the police.
If your police force can’t instill the fear of God into some drunken teenagers, something is gravely wrong in your town. When you are searching out a house party full of kids instead of potential drunk drivers of legal drinking age, your priorities are misplaced.
