Controlling street parties is necessary, reprimanding those who attend them is not.
From Aug. 28 to Sept. 13, the City of Kingston, Kingston Police, and Queen’s University implemented the University District Safety Initiative (UDSI) to curtail “large unsanctioned gatherings.” The UDSI is designed to “encourage safer behaviour,” largely through greater enforcement of fines.
Unsanctioned, unmanaged gatherings, especially large street parties, are inherently dangerous. Combine that with excessive drinking and there is a real risk posed to students; many of whom still underestimate how dangerous alcohol can be.
Street parties in prior years have seen cars flipped, and houses wrecked. They also take place in neighbourhoods where families live, and limiting the chaos keeps them safe too. The idea of protecting students and the community around them is not irrational, and measures like these may well prevent some serious incidents.
Protection is important; however, it should not be accomplished through punishment. But punishment is exactly what the UDSI is designed to accomplish.
Fining students for street parties is an overreaction at best, and drastic overkill at worst. With the party culture at Queen’s, fines won’t be enough to discourage drinking.
Sixty-eight students were fined during Labour Day weekend, totalling $2,600, compared to the estimated 7,000 who attended. Enforcement concentrated on specific neighbourhoods, with a few dozen students picked out, amounts to making an example of people. The fines resemble a humiliation ritual rather than a legitimate concern for students.
Granted, the days of the extremely chaotic celebrations have seemingly been left in that past at Queen’s, given the downward trend of fines in recent years, and that could be partially attributed to the UDSI. However, it certainly hasn’t been entirely successful in deterring the party culture at Queen’s
Yet deterring that culture does seems to be the goal. As done in previous years, the University has scheduled homecoming to coincide with the weekend that students are typically home for fall reading week.
The sentiment among students is that this has been done in an effort to curb homecoming partying, but it impacts other groups as well. Alumni have expressed their dissatisfaction, travelling back to campus only to find a student-less city, and as future alumni ourselves, we shouldn’t accept it either.
Despite the fact that drinking and unsanctioned nuisance parties are often framed as the primary threat to student safety, it’s not a very compelling argument. Drug overdoses in Kingston, for example, have risen dramatically in recent years. That is not to say that Queen’s students are the group most at-risk, but if there’s a sudden push to ensure the safety of students, it would stand to reason that should extend to stronger education towards recreational narcotics.
And yet, virtually no university-run programs combatting the use of drugs and alcohol are established in conjunction with the USDI.
If safety is the goal, there are potentially more impactful efforts, and more efficient solutions.
The UDSI has the right idea and the wrong application. There’s no need to further degrade the social culture of Queen’s, one of the truly unique characteristics of this University, simply to levy a punitive punishment on students.
— Journal Editorial Board
Tags
Labour Day, Queen's Party Culture, UDSI
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Zedrick Serson
This article reads like someone got an AMP for attending a nuisance party and is really mad about it.