The Bud Stops Here
Norman Barnes Is a Big Man With a Big Job: Stopping Underage Drinking at GMU

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006

Alexander Yun, a sophomore at George Mason University, shared some beer on a recent Friday night with a friend off campus and then strolled over to the university with his buddy. It was a pleasantly cool evening, move-in weekend, and as harried moms and dads lugged boxes into dorms, Yun, a slightly built guy in cargo shorts and orange polo shirt, greeted Officer Tony Barton, who had been a track coach on campus the year before.

Yun probably wishes now he hadn't been so friendly. Barton and his partner, Sharon Radfar, smelled alcohol. Radfar asked both young men for identification and discovered that Yun was 19. His companion was in his early twenties.

Yun wasn't carrying a beer can or a bottle. A breathalyzer test registered a blood-alcohol level of 0.052, well below the 0.08 standard for drunk driving.

It didn't matter. Radfar charged him with underage possession of alcohol -- inside his body. Yun wandered off, a citation in his hand, looking slightly bewildered, while a couple of hundred feet away, Radfar's boss, Lt. Norman Barnes, nodded his approval. Radfar, Barnes explained, was doing her job. Beginning this past July, a new Virginia law mandates that anyone under the age of 21 convicted of alcohol possession -- for any amount, whether on or in the body -- will lose his or her driver's license for six months.

Barnes, 51, may be the Washington area's most visible campus alcohol cop and not just because he's 6 feet 9, weighs close to 300 pounds and wears size 16 high-top Nikes. It's also because he has made alcohol enforcement the top priority in the day-to-day police operation at an increasingly prominent institution with 30,500 students on four campuses, many of whom are under the legal drinking age.

The numbers show the change in emphasis: In 2002, George Mason's police force made 59 arrests for liquor law violations on the main Fairfax County campus; in 2005 there were more than five times that, or 311. Hundreds more students were referred to the dean's office or to counselors in each of those years.

Barnes is not satisfied, however. Cruising the campus in his navy Crown Victoria, he says not everyone on the force is pulling his or her weight. One of his four squads rarely makes arrests on weekends, when most alcohol-related incidents occur. That's going to change.

He drives by a group of six students on a street corner. "Freshmen," he growls. He stops and lowers his window.

"How ya doin'?" he calls out. And then, "What are ya doin'?"

"Just hangin' out," a young man answers.

Fat chance. And Barnes knows it. He proceeds to a small parking lot where, he says, the pack is headed. Other first-year students already there are waiting to be picked up by fraternity guys who will take them to parties off campus. Barnes spies a subcompact packed with so many students it looks like a car crammed with circus clowns. He sees one of his officers.

"They've got too many kids back there," he tells the officer. "Make some of them get out. And then park your car on the corner so students can see that police are around."

Within minutes, the lot is deserted. Barnes can't prevent students under 21 from drinking, but he can sure make it more difficult.

Cracking Down

Barnes is well aware that college students are going to drink. Heck, he drank in college, though not a lot. His coaches saw to that, sending him out to run laps if he dared stumble back to his apartment early in the morning.

He grew up in the east end of Richmond, the son of a house painter and a nurse. Western Texas College, a basketball powerhouse in the junior college circuit, offered him a full scholarship, and as captain he led the team to a national championship in 1975.

Barnes played ball with an American all-star team for one season in South America, then returned to Richmond for two more years of school and basketball at Virginia Commonwealth University. Upon graduation he signed with a club team in Brazil before being told by his physician that his knees were shot. He spent a year as recreation director at a maximum-security prison, then entered the police academy at VCU where he was dubbed "Moses Hightower" after the car-ripping bruiser in the "Police Academy" films. Upon graduating from the academy, he went to work as a police officer at VCU.

Barnes acknowledges that cops, including campus cops, are known for throwing back a beer or three. He tells a story about being on duty at VCU when a bunch of his police pals, including a wet-behind-the-ears dispatcher, went out to party after their shift ended. The dispatcher returned drunk and, despite several warnings from Barnes, climbed in his car and sped away. Barnes chased him down and gave him a ticket for drunk driving.

Barnes had not just fingered a fellow officer. The dispatcher was his boss's nephew. The VCU force ignored him for more than a year after that, he says.

So why is he on a tear now about college drinking? There are several reasons. When he left VCU to join the Mason force 20 years ago, the university was a commuter school with about 15,000 students, only 1,600 who lived on campus. Whatever drinking was done happened off campus for the most part. Today, the school has a much larger enrollment, with 4,200 students living on campus and thousands more nearby. More students equal more problems.

The nature of the consumption has changed as well, according to Barnes. Students do not drink as often as they did a generation ago, but more of them drink to get drunk, he says. Vodka, whiskey and other high-proof beverages are common.

At conferences around the country, he hears the same story from other campus police officials: Fights related to excessive alcohol consumption are up and so are sexual assaults. More students are being taken to the hospital to be treated for alcohol poisoning.

The reaction by college administrations has been striking, particularly to those who grew up in the toga-partying days of the 1960s and '70s. One out of three colleges and universities now bans alcohol on campus for any student, including those 21 and older, according to an ongoing study by the Harvard School of Public Health. Two out of five forbid it in any university housing. Half of small colleges restrict alcohol at football games, tailgate parties, concerts and alumni events.

Georgetown University is considering a campus ban on kegs. At the University of Oklahoma, no alcohol is allowed for students of any age in residence halls, fraternity houses, sorority houses or on the surrounding grounds. No more three strikes and you're out for students at the University of Colorado at Boulder who violate drinking laws on or off campus -- two times will send you packing. At the University of Maryland at College Park, a school employee now lives in each fraternity house on campus to keep an eye on parties and alcohol.

That's just the rules side of the equation. On the counseling side, approximately four out of five schools ask new or prospective students to take an online alcohol education program. About the same number offer students alcohol-free dorms or residence halls.

Students' welfare is not all that's at stake. So is institutional liability and reputation. From the 1960s until the mid-'90s, courts generally rejected the idea that colleges were supposed to protect students from harm. In 1997, that trend started to reverse after Scott Krueger, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died of alcohol poisoning in the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house. Krueger's parents sued MIT, which eventually paid out $6 million: $4.75 million to the family and $1.25 million to a fund in Scott's honor. According to Brett Sokolow, a risk management consultant, universities have been scrambling ever since to reduce the odds of being sued. Demonstrating that you're doing all that you can to stem drinking may reduce the size of a potential judgment.

At a national conference Barnes recently attended, "liability was all we talked about," he says.

Mason officials also don't want to see an alcohol-related tragedy mar the school's reputation, says Barnes. That's become a bigger concern since the basketball team's trip to the Final Four of the last NCAA tournament.

"College presidents don't like negative publicity," he says.

Most days, Barnes likes his work, but sometimes it gets to him. Last winter, an officer called him in the middle of the night and said that he was wanted at Fairfax Hospital. A freshman at George Mason was so intoxicated that she had been put on a ventilator, and the attending physician had asked that someone from the university notify her family.

"That someone would be me," Barnes says, cruising up the ramp of a parking garage on the night of Yun's arrest looking for drinkers or stashes of booze. His normally booming voice has gone soft. "She had been drinking with her sorority sisters before the basketball game. At a phenomenal rate. When she got to the game she was highly intoxicated. Her sorority sisters tried to get her back to her room, but she slipped outside and hit her head.

"Her blood-alcohol level was so high, the doctor was more concerned about that than the head trauma. She came out of it okay, but it was touchy for a while. Could have been a situation where she didn't survive."

The Dilemma of Consistency

As Alex Yun discovered, the Virginia General Assembly handed Barnes and his fellow officers a new weapon last year in their fight against underage drinking.

"Once that law passed, I knew exactly what the legislature wanted us to do," says Barnes. "The courts are enforcing the law boom, boom, boom."

It's noon on a weekday, and Barnes is sitting in his small office filled with metal cabinets of old arrest forms and cardboard boxes of tickets yet to be used. A large calendar sketched on dry board shows the arrests each day by each of his four squads. He's proud of the squad he's been after: On Saturday, Sept. 16, its officers made 17 arrests. "That squad hadn't made 17 arrests in five years," he says.

Down the hall is the office of Police Chief Michael Lynch, Barnes's boss, who checks the dry board from time to time. Lynch, a friendly, barrel-chested fellow, wasn't thrilled about the way Yun's arrest was handled. "That one incident doesn't describe the philosophy of the department," he says with a slight harrumph, declining to elaborate. A couple of minutes later, however, he says: "Are we too heavy-handed? I can't say that we are. That 19-year-old, maybe he just had a couple of beers, but maybe he had been setting up keg stands and beer bongs."

Lynch says he's satisfied with Barnes's initiative. "We only had one alcohol-related transport to the hospital in the first two weeks of school. There have been some weekends in the past when we've hauled off four or five kids. I don't mind the number of parties we're breaking up, the number of kids referred to court.

"We don't shy away from our reputation of strictly enforcing the laws."

Their job would be easier, in Barnes's mind, if there were more coordination between their department and the rest of the school. An intoxicated student can end up being cited by the housing office once, by the dean's office on another occasion and by police a third time. Each agency has its own way of handling violators and they don't always agree on approach.

At Barnes's suggestion, representatives of the various departments now meet every Monday morning to discuss the events of the weekend just ended. Their goal is the same: to stop underage students from drinking or at least help them learn how to drink responsibly. Their approaches, however, differ.

The police believe in shaking students up to get their attention and then teaching them about alcohol in classes run by the department. The deans and housing officers lean toward counseling students into making better decisions. "The academics," says Barnes, "want to be the students' 'friends.' " He crooks the first two fingers of both hands as he says the word "friends."

Dean of students Pam Patterson resists commenting on the police department's new enforcement strategy. She acknowledges, however, that her office takes an educational, as opposed to punitive, approach to student drinking. A first or, perhaps, even a second offender referred to her office is connected to the university's director of alcohol education. Attempts are made to establish the student's drinking history and the reasons for it. "It's difficult to know which is best, counseling or a criminal charge," Patterson says. "Each person is an individual and each situation is different."

Patterson feels any increase in drinking at Mason is a result of the growth in enrollment, not of a change in the character of the students. She admits to having reservations about the new law. "I don't know if it's a good law," she says. "We're a learning environment for students and part of that is social learning. People have to be in a position to make some mistakes and to learn that mistakes come with consequences. Ask me in six months how I feel."

David Hoffman, assistant dean of students at Truman University, a small, public institution in Missouri, knows how he feels. In August 2005, a mandate similar to the new Virginia statute went into effect. Anyone younger than 21, if visibly intoxicated or registering at least .02 on a breathalyzer test (basically, one beer), could be charged with illegal possession of alcohol. If found guilty, the youth would lose his driver's license for 30 days with a first offense, 90 days for a second offense and a year for a third.

Though a less punitive measure than Virginia's, it doesn't have Hoffman's support. That's partly because Missouri legislators didn't foresee that with even a 30-day license suspension, students' annual car insurance payments could increase by as much as $5,000.

The result? "I'm seeing considerable expense spent by students or their parents on hiring lawyers," Hoffman says, "and a bigger chip on the shoulders of student violators when they come to meet with me."

It's too early to tell whether that experience will be repeated at Mason, but Barnes is hoping it won't. He genuinely likes students, and knows he needs their cooperation. He has put in 12- and 14-hour days since school started, talking to dorm advisers, fraternities and sororities, athletes and groups of freshmen. He hands out his cellphone number and wears a tiny wireless headset around his ear so he can take calls regardless of what he's doing.

After midnight on the night of Yun's arrest, he heads over to a Comfort Inn, where a couple of hundred freshmen are being housed temporarily. He spends a few minutes talking to student Katie Morrison, a slender young woman with long, curly spirals of light brown hair. So she wants to go to medical school? What is required for that? Oh, her parking decal doesn't work on the main campus? How does she get to her job?

A couple of weeks after their conversation, after she has gotten the runaround from several university departments, he takes her to the right office and waits while her problem is corrected.

Does he do this out of the goodness of his heart or because he needs another snitch? He smiles and says nothing. It's probably a bit of both. The truth is, he needs "buy-in" from students if his get-tough policy has any chance of success.

The night she meets Barnes, Morrison, 18, rejects the idea of being a tattler.

"Ratting out other kids is not cool," she says. "I'm not going to be the one to get other kids in trouble. Then I wouldn't be invited to the parties."

Barnes has critics who say he's going about enforcement the wrong way. Byong Yun, Alexander's father, is one of them.

"I find the whole incident [with my son] rather disgusting," says Yun, an architect in McLean whose son declined to talk about the arrest. "Alex had, like, one beer before going onto campus. I mean, we're seeing 18- and 19-year-olds going to Iraq to get themselves blown up, doing the dirty work for older adults. At the same time, we treat other teenagers like irresponsible children.

"If he had been drinking and driving, it would have been a different story for me," says Yun.

The dilemma that Barnes and other officers face is not unlike that of a parent. Is it better to be uniformly firm about the rules, or to show some understanding of individual behavior and circumstance? Cops, like parents, wrestle with a big gray area every day. Meanwhile, some kids are getting wasted. Or trying to.

Barnes, leaning back in his oversize office chair, has another story to tell. Two of his officers recently received a phone call about a party in Wilson Hall, a freshman dorm. By the time the officers arrived at the room, the students had vanished. But the evidence was sobering.

"There was a trash can with beer bottles stuck in the middle of the trash, a laundry bag with beer hidden under the clothes, and a beer bong table folded up and placed in the closet to look like a dart board," Barnes says.

"I'm trying to change a culture, but this is a culture that is cultivated long before these kids get to college."

He stretches out his big hands and then moves them closer together.

"The gray is shrinking," he says.