Judy McGovern takes on the high tax burden shouldered by the local Habitat for Humanity. “Welcome to Treetown, where even the low-income must be at the top of their class,” she writes.
Also, Ypsipanties.
Alcohol, a headline in The Ann Arbor News announces, “fuels [the] U-M party scene.”
The reporter describes the scene outside a fraternity house with breathless prose fit for a Newsweek article whose title is a vaguely alarming question in which the words “YOUR Kids” feature prominently. A group of women go to a fraternity party, “looking for a good time. The doorman lets them in.” These two sentences form their own paragraph.
This party took place at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, when “most of Ann Arbor has gone to bed.” But there were at least some townies who didn’t mind - two 26-year-old “party watchers” who have never been affiliated with the university but come out to “watch the kids,” especially the “Britney Spearses and Christina Aguileras.”
The News runs with another article about the “party patrol” and their heroic efforts to ticket public drinkers, including a 27-year-old man drinking a beer on the lawn of a house.
“Hammer them as many times as you can,” Sgt. James Baird told the officers as they prepared to begin their enforcement effort at 10 p.m. Behind him in the briefing room, the phrase “Hammer Time” was written on a dry erase board.
Hey, we’ve got a tip for them - on some Saturdays around South Main, you can sometimes see people sitting by their cars, drinking in plain view in the middle of the day. The practice is so widespread that it even has a name: “tailgating.”
A new installment in our seemingly endless series of break-in posts, but this one is a real doozy - someone was actually arrested in an A2 break-in. The perpetrators were three students who climbed through a window at the Perry Building. They could be charged with burglary, even though it’s not clear if they were trying to steal anything. The crime is currently “under investigation.”
A message board bills itself “the official ann arbor sucks site.” A poster links to the official Ann Arbor Sucks site. Yeah, that’s right.
The Ann Arbor Police are moving to investigate the wave of break-ins that’s plaguing the area of late. No, no, not those break-ins, the ones where student houses are routinely burglarized. The victims of these crimes are instead local stores that sell cigarettes, who are targeted by thieves stealing as much as $1,000 worth at a time. That’s almost as much as the value of some of the laptop/DVD player/guitar amplifier hauls brought in by the Ann Arbor burglars who are a little more savvy about whom to target.
We return from a weeklong break from this blog only to find that the AAPD isn’t wasting any time carrying out their duties to serve and protect - protecting townies from loud parties by serving students with 140 tickets as part of their new “party patrol” effort. The previous weekend, 287 tickets were handed out. This initiative involves 10 officers working weekend nights to stop “underage drinking and drinking in public.” That’s right, A2 burglars looking for a night when the force might be a little short-handed - weekend nights.
Yeah, we’re out of it. Why else would it take us three days to link to an Ann Arbor News letter headed “Loud rock music was poor business decision”? The letter, concerning Leopold Brothers’ abrupt, city-influenced decision to stop featuring live music, questions why the police didn’t put a stop to the notoriously violence-inducing indie rock sooner. “I also don’t understand why the police don’t quickly enforce noise ordinances to shut off loud music in residential areas. The extent to which they dawdle and equivocate makes one wonder whether they might not be fostering the violence they say they seek to prevent.” But the writer falls prey to a common misconception. The Ann Arbor Police have said they seek to write traffic tickets, not prevent violence.