Police pay visit to off-campus students

By Cara Quackenbush

For the fifth year in a row, the Associated Students, the Center for Student Life and Leadership, the Santa Clara Police Department and now local homeowners went door-to-door to educate students about their rights and responsibilities living off campus.

Armed with copies of "A Guide To Living off Campus" and the "2001-02 Community Handbook," the two groups met together Saturday morning before venturing out to ring the doorbells of off-campus houses to answer questions and, hopefully, foster mutual respect.

One of the main issues the group wished to address was the ongoing concern among long-time homeowners in the area about student parties and excessive noise.

According to Joe McNally, student body president, many residents who work nine to five jobs have concerns about parties getting out of hand.

"One of the big things they were concerned about was noise levels from parties," he said, adding that one goal of the afternoon was to make students more aware and more considerate of their homeowner neighbors.

"I'm glad they came over," junior Keith Candu said. "I didn't realize that we had already broken several rules without knowing it, but on the same note, we've never gotten a complaint from our neighbors."

Officer Jake Malae of the SCPD, who describes himself as a friend of many off-campus students, has participated in the door-to-door walks for two years and has found them to be effective in building relationships.

"It's important for [students] to know that we are not in an antagonistic or adversarial role, but we're here to help them and to serve and for their safety," he said.

While most off-campus students could appreciate the reasons behind the door-to-door approach and found much of the information informative, some thought that the education should go both ways.

Junior Bryan Perrault considers his relationship with non-student neighbors as generally good, but has had anonymous phone calls made to the police regarding excessive noise coming from his house.

He prefers that in such cases, the bothered neighbor just walk over to his house and talk to him directly without involving the police, which he believes creates unnecessary friction between the two parties.

"Getting the police involved makes students get angry at the police," he said. "That's not very fair."

Joanne Bruna, long-time resident, homeowner and chairperson of the homeowner group called The Alviso Street Area Neighborhood Group, refused to comment on what she or other local homeowners consider the appropriate action to take against excessive student noise.

Instead, she emphasized the group's objective to "restore a safe and decent quality of life to the neighborhood." She thinks that Saturday's "walk and talk" was a positive step toward this end.

"Response is what is important. Students were coming over and saying 'thank you for caring,'" she said after the door-to-door walk, adding, "I believe in Santa Clara University students."

But despite these hopeful beginnings, the effectiveness of the campaign remains to be seen.

Several students such as Candu voiced that while they appreciated the outreach effort, and did respect their neighbors, they didn't anticipate relations to change drastically.

Perrault agreed.

"Do I think this is going to make a difference? I don't think so. But at least students know what they're getting into when they do it," he said.

McNally also agreed that this effort may not single-handedly dissolve the tensions between police, neighbors and students, but does believe it makes a difference. He estimated that about 95 percent of all students they talked to responded favorably.

"It's one of the many things we need to do to start bridging the gap between residents and students. But students are always going to have a different lifestyle and they're not going to change that," he said.

"These types of actions have shown the city that we're making an effort."