A sea of red (and yellow)

After last weekend's football game, Nebraska v. USC, I was somewhat flooded with complaints about the failure of our police officers to stop all the public urination. One of the complaints was forwarded to me by City Council member John Spatz from a constituent who was particularly upset that there were no police around in his neighborhood:

"Parties started at 8 am and didn't even break for the game at 7 pm, and continued unabated until the wee hours...the situation as "anarchy".... as for urination in public: I stopped counting at 30 and that was just at one party...."

This particular citizen wanted more police in his neighborhood to patrol around preventing this kind of problem. It's a neighborhood close to the stadium, where everyone with an empty lot or a back yard off the alley seems to rent $10 parking spaces. Trouble is, they don't rent out their toilets. As I explained to Councilman Spatz, when a few thousand people descend on a neighborhood, drink, eat, and make merry, nature will inevitably take its course, and if there aren't banks of porta potties there will be trees, walls, and bushes, whether the police are around or not.

We have our hands very full on game days. Along with directing traffic to get 85,000 into and out of the Stadium, we handled 474 incidents on Saturday, Sept. 15, including 31 thefts, 2 rapes, 8 missing persons, 7 child abuses, 3 death investigations, 29 assaults, 31 traffic accidents, 104 disturbances, and so forth. It's not very realistic to expect that the police will be available very much to drive around streets and lots issuing citations for public urination. We give it a good try, though, and there are hundreds of citations issued annually for this.

Jean Chalupsky, in a letter to the editor in Monday's Omaha World Herald, described a similar scene:

"As I approached Memorial Stadium at 5:30 p.m. with my aging parents, Iviewed at least 12 males urinating on the sidewalk in open view. Even more were carrying open beer cans."

I called Ms. Calupsky on the phone and we had a nice chat. I wanted to pinpoint the area, and it was right where I suspected, near the pedestrian exit to a large private parking lot where the tailgating was particularly spirited, so to speak. Her take on the situation was different than most. She wasn't concerned so much about the lack police to take enforcement action (she realized we were quite busy), rather, she thought the problem was largely the lack of facilities when the need was so obvious and could be predicted so far in advance.

Not every problem is a police problem, and not every problem responds well to police presence or enforcement. Ms. Chalupsky is quite correct. In this case, the problem is not the lack of police officers or tickets, it's the lack of toilets. We can help, though. We need to make sure that the large lots (often just a field during the other 358 days of the year) are taking care of business, so to speak. That's what we'll be trying to do as the season continues--contact whoever owns or leases those lots and make they understand the nuances of Lincoln's municipal ordinance 9.20.030, Maintaining a Disorderly House, which, despite the name, applies to any premise--not just a house.