Understanding Your Local Problem

The information provided above is only a generalized description of the problem of student party riots. You must combine the basic facts with a more specific understanding of your local problem. The specific characteristics of student party riots tend to vary greatly across jurisdictions. Analyzing your local problem carefully will help you design a more effective response strategy.

Asking the Right Questions

Since large-scale student party riots are relatively rare, you may not be able to observe an event carefully before formulating your response strategy. You may even have to rely on the details of a single past event when conducting your analysis.

The following are some critical questions you should ask in analyzing your particular problem of student party riots, even if the answers are not always readily available. Your answers to these and other questions will help you choose the most appropriate set of responses later on.

When performing your analysis, it can be helpful to consider how the information you collect fits into each of the five stages of student gatherings, so you can tailor your intervention strategies accordingly. You should try to gather as much information about each stage as possible and use multiple information sources. These may include interviews or surveys of students,† community residents, local businesses, and police officers, as well as past media coverage, and police and university records. It may be helpful for police to partner with local universities or researchers to design, test, and administer any proposed surveys.

† For an example of how you can use an online university student survey to gather information about student party riots, see this report [PDF].

Initial Planning

Preassembly Preparation

Assembling Process

Assembled Gathering

Dispersal Process

Measuring Your Effectiveness

Measurement allows you to determine to what degree your efforts have succeeded, and suggests how you might modify your responses if they are not producing the intended results. You should take measures of your problem before you implement responses, to determine how serious the problem is, and after you implement them, to determine whether they have been effective. All measures should be taken in both the target area and the surrounding area. (For more detailed guidance on measuring effectiveness, see the companion guide to this series, Assessing Responses to Problems: An Introductory Guide for Police Problem-Solvers.)

You should consider the possibility of displacing student parties to other sites, and you should consider the possibility that successful prevention at the primary location might prevent disruptive student parties at other locations (i.e., diffusion of crime prevention benefits). [25] The lack of systematic research into student party riots makes it difficult to give precise advice regarding either displacement or diffusion of benefits. However, there are some rules of thumb that are generally useful. First, the most likely displacement sites will have characteristics similar to the disturbance sites you are already examining. Look for locations that are already student party sites, though at a lower intensity. Potential displacement sites are unlikely to be located far from student concentrations, so the number of possible locations you need to investigate may be quite limited. You can monitor these sites to detect displacement. You should also consider low-intensity interventions designed to limit displacement.†

† As you are relying on your best guesses regarding displacement sites, it is unclear whether they would become troublesome if left unaddressed. So unless they are already troublesome, they probably do not warrant costly interventions. Simple interventions may be sufficient to keep them from becoming major trouble spots.

Diffusion of crime prevention benefits can occur if preventing a disturbance also suppresses other possible disturbances. For example, alcohol controls designed to prevent one disturbance might also make it difficult for smaller drinking parties to grow. University controls and police enforcement can influence students to keep parties small and relatively discreet. Consultations with landlord groups can sensitize landlords throughout the university student community to get more involved in heading off disruptive parties. So while you should focus on preventing specific disturbances, you should also take advantage of potential prevention multipliers.

The following are potentially useful measures of the effectiveness of responses to student party riots:

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