Feature: VTPD Goes Downtown

Shower, check. Hair and makeup, check. New top, check. Matching pumps, check. Cell phone, wallet, ID, check. It’s Thursday night and right on schedule. 10:30 has arrived, so it’s time to catch a ride over to a friend’s house for a light pre-game before making our way to downtown Blacksburg.

With extra cash to spring for a Hooptie ride home, hundreds of Virginia Tech students, Blacksburg locals, and in town visitors head to North Main Street each weekend for good drinks and better times.

The Blacksburg Police and Virginia Tech Police departments gear up and head out as well. Their mission: to ensure “proactive patrol” and to instill the perception of being everywhere at once, said officer Geof Allen, community outreach officer for the Virginia Tech Police Department.

Allen said, the “age of criminality,” the ages where one is most likely to commit the most crime, is from 18 - 26, and when those odds are mixed with a college campus as large as Virginia Tech and a downtown area as busy as Blacksburg’s, the local police work hard to keep the busy party nights of Thursday, Friday and Saturday under control and in a close check.

The Virginia Tech Police Department [VTPD] shares jurisdiction with the Blacksburg Police Department, but usually stays on the downtown side with reflective cars that catch the eye on North and South Main Street beats, and bikes that stick to the central area, said Allen. “We want people to see us … to know we’re out there,” he explained.

“With proactive patrol, the criminal element will think twice and hopefully the intoxicated individual will go home,” Allen said.  

The idea of omnipresence seems to be effective.  “I feel like they’re always patrolling Main Street and the entrances of Top of the Stairs and Sharkey’s,” said Brent Cinalli, a 21-year-old finance major at Virginia Tech.

The VTPD may only have up to seven officers on patrol on a given weekend night, with the Blacksburg Police Department contributing about the same. There are around 680 Virginia Tech students for every police officer, so if Blacksburg needs assistance the VTPD doesn’t hesitate to get there. “Their supervisor says fight and we all go running,” joked Allen.

The fall tends to be more active than the spring when it comes to downtown. Allen guesses this is probably due to students running out of money, colder weather, and academic probation forcing students to pay more attention to their studies. All of these reasons keep students off of Main Street and inside their homes later in the school year.

“Including summons and citations such as underage alcohol possession that require a presence in court, the VTPD averages 60 arrests on a typical weekend night downtown,” said Allen. “These are mostly individuals who call attention to themselves and stand out from the crowd.”

Allen explained that the officers do not target people to arrest. It is when the intoxicated individual becomes a safety threat to both himself and others that the officers “have no choice” but to arrest.

Cinalli said he knew “quite a few people who have had run-ins with the downtown police and received drunk in public or underage possession charges.” With regard to arrests he said, “for the most part, it doesn’t seem like the police go out of their way to get kids in trouble, they usually deserve it.”

Allen explained that while officers have the authority to warn, summons or arrest, he is more likely to let someone go who has a sober friend to keep them in check. It becomes a problem when there isn’t a friend to keep them out of the road or keep them from doing “the stupid thing that [they’re] about to do,” said Allen. “Someone has to get them home and that becomes [the officer’s] job.”

Jesse Richey, manager of Sharkey’s Rib and Wing Joint on North Main Street, experienced this behavior firsthand last year around November when a few guys decided to come into the bar early and drink late. “One of the guys decided to go into the men’s bathroom and pull the urinal off the wall, like [he] actually ripped the pipe out of the wall and pulled the urinal off somehow,” said Richey.

Coupling the nature of the event with the water flooding the area, involving the Blacksburg Police Department was inevitable and the individual was charged and prosecuted accordingly.

Ryan Ruggero, daytime manager of local restaurant and bar Top of the Stairs [TOTS], said TOTS is “pretty much a problem free place,” but almost all of the staff have the non-emergency Blacksburg Police Department number in their personal phones in case of an event.

“A lot of the time the police are right out front and, if necessary, employees can yell down for assistance,” said Ruggero. “The employees don’t talk to the officials if they don’t need to. [The police] come in here every now and then and just take a look around, but that is also very rare.” 

Allen described fake IDs as “a typical issue for colleges forever” and warned that the ID doesn’t need to be in actual use for the officer to confiscate it and charge the individual. “If you are carrying the ID all day long … on a traffic stop, if you pull out your ID and [the officer] see[s] two licenses, then you can be charged with that,” said Allen.

“We don’t have much of a problem [with fake IDs] because our door guys are good at spotting them” said Ruggero. “The individual is simply asked to leave and further action is only taken if it becomes apparent that the holder is a repeat offender.”

While “a lot of people have them, obviously,” said Richey, the Sharkey’s staff is well trained on how to spot fake IDs. Along with simply turning the under-aged drinker away, Sharkey’s exercises the right to confiscate the suspicious ID and either turn it over to authorities or have its rightful owner pick it up.