Microblogging’s influence on LMU parties
Kudo’s to Tracy over at living90045.com for researching this subject and posting about it in an article called What The Heck Is MicroBlogging?
In previous times when you wanted to throw a party you got on the phone, talked to real people and told them what time and date to show up. Sometimes you might have made up a quick flyer and passed it around to others but needless to say it was a lot of work.
No more. In the days of instant messaging and wireless internet, parties have become a spontaneous series of events and less predictiable for our families living next door to LMU students living in single family homes throughout the community.
In a previous article I wrote about a series of parties next door to me noting that “these frankly -odd- parties that start and stop in fits where I have to almost weekly call LAPD. Sometimes I think these kids are following a script and moving from one house to another because the partying sometimes doesn’t start -until- 12:00AM, other times they start at 10:00PM and end at 12:00AM and later restart again at 2:00PM.”
Well, the script is the common cell phone and its messaging features. Notably Twitter and Facebook.
www.living90045.com points out an article called Micro-blogging will get you into parties in The Loyolan that elaborates on ‘micro-blogging’. This is a cell phone sized blog that constantly keeps students up to date on where their friends are reporting they are, what parties are going on, what parties are happening and what parties where the police are showing up.
Microblogging includes short little text messages and even rolling newsfeeds of what your friends are doing.
The author of the Loyolan articles writes about Twitter saying:
There wasn’t a dull moment. On a Friday night, I could pull up the site and just see a list of my friends’ activities – which bars they were at, who was still pre-gaming,… (what) people were throwing parties (and if there were free drinks). No need for that superficial what-are-you-doing-tonight conversation.
As far as parties go – there’s more to it than just finding them. It’s about letting people know when a party gets rolled by the cops. It’s letting your friends know when the party moves elsewhere or when you go from dinner to the dance.
So if your wondering if these parties seem to be more spontaneous than they used to be, your right. Instant messaging means instant party, and they can start quickly at any time of the day or evening. Just as quickly they can end abruptly and restart hours later as students move from party to party fed by today’s technology and making it more difficult for police to respond.
Your best bet is to call the police right away (1.877.275.5273) when parties start at odd times. If the parties are frequent then file a “disturbing the peace” report the next morning at Pacific Division and let Loyola Marymount know of the problem so that they can send letters to the property owner.
The City of Los Angeles has a very strict Loud Party Ordinance on the books (41.57 and 41.58 LAMC).
This is how it should work: The police is called about a loud party. The police responds and contacts the responsible party at the party location and issues a written warning on a loud party violation form, which explains the consequences of a second police response. The officer then calls the station and causes the responsible party’s name and identifying information to be placed on a Loud Party Violation Log in the Watch Commander’s office.
If the party continues to be a problem and there is a second police response, the following should occur:
The officers will respond with a supervisor and and will contact the responsible party from the prior contact. They will issue a Misdemeanor citation for violation of the above municipal ordinance. The officer will also request necessary assistance from other police units, and maybe even a helicopter, in order to close down the party.
Besides the fine, the responsible party will also be billed for the costs (police salaries, jet fuel for the helicopter, and any other police expenses) associated with shutting down the party. That means police assets will remain in the area until ALL party goers are gone from the area.
These expenses will be tallied at the end of the call and will be forwarded to the city attorney’s office to be added to the fine the responsible party will be paying. It can get VERY expensive.
Thank you, David, for the shout out!
I have to think that there is a way for the neighborhood to organize around this technology, too. Maybe organized complaint calls when a party erupts. It would annoy the heck out of our friends in blue, but it might cause them to put more pressure on the school.
Tracy
Good luck calling LAPD. If you call the 877 number mentioned on a Thursday to Saturday evening, they will take the report, but no one will respond. The call will dry up and go away.
Better to call 911, so there is a hard log of the call as a 911 event. Express your concerns – underage drinking and driving, drug use, drunken coeds at risk, etc. Be sure you have the exact house address of the party when you report.
Follow up with a call 15 minutes later to the watch commander (310-482-6334), when still no one responds. Note that the number will be busy often, and you’ll need to insist on speaking to the watch commander or desk sergeant, as the officer answering the phone will try to dump you into the dispatch queue, so as to have you ignored again.
Ask your neighbors to make calls as well. Multiple calls to 911 do aggregate and get attention where single calls get ignored.
Note, that you should only do this if you feel the party is out of control, if it presents a real disturbance or threat to public safety. Students should have some freedom to congregate and kick back, so long as they do so in a responsible and considerate manner.
Party calls are NOT emergency calls and 9-1-1 should not be used. It just delays the call because the 9-1-1 operator will re-direct the call and the caller will be on hold for a while.
The non-emergency line is 3-1-1. Or call the station directly at (310) 482-6334.
There is now “party cars” deployed on weekends who respond to party calls and handle the necessary prosecution of hosts after the first visit. Contact SLO Garcia (east of Sepulveda) or SLO Ramos (west of Sepulveda) who usually work on weekend nights whenever possible to especifically address the party issues.
Perhaps we homeowners/residents can microblog each other when we see parties at whatever time at night/morning so that we can all instantly call LAPD as well as the LMU folks.
in the same way airplane noise comes with the territory of living near an airport, so do “parties” when you live next door to a college campus. unless you are so old that it is impossible to do so, try remember the way you were and how you felt when you were in college, relishing in your newfound freedom. by treating the college kids with the respect they feel they deserve, explaining that you have a child who is sleeping, or a wife that needs to work at 5 am, perhaps they will in return give you the respect and consideration you deserve. by waging an “us vs them” war, and involving the police, you are only fueling their spite and reluctance to comply with you requests. just food for thought….
This is going to be a caustic comment.
First of all, Chris Lesinski (the author of the article referenced) and I are close friends. We are both interested in technology and came up with the idea of using services like Twitter to communicate the status of parties. We run the blog HackCollege and I contribute from time to time to Portfolio magazine’s tech column.
I’m very disappointed that his article has been pulled out of context both by KNBC and the entire community of Westchester. His article was originally intended to be a hypothesis and an encouragement to use such technology.
His first paragraph–if read correctly–is specific to living in San Francisco. We both worked at internships over the summer in the city. San Francisco’s density and technophilia makes it a perfect candidate for Twitter to thrive. The only other place I have seen effective “flash-mobbing” is at a technology conference.
Twitter is used by less than 10 students at LMU, and the Facebook status updates are rarely checked remotely, especially on a Friday night.
Sure, the parts of the article highlighted give homeowners a very frightening picture. But this is not the state of student communication today. If it was, the party problem would be unstoppable, even on campus. Micro-blogging is not contributing to the number of off-campus parties. It just seems like it is a suitable scapegoat for technophobes.
And let’s be more realistic when talking about breaking up these parties. It’s bad enough to have the noise of a house party, but a helicopter will wake the entire neighborhood up. LMU families may be a little better off than your average American family, but it’s just plain unrealistic for any group of people to pay a six-figure bill.
[...] – what a laughable bunch of yuppies) which purported the same misconception. And then another from anonymous “westchester dad” – who can’t even own up to his own blog [...]
So Kelly… Mobile DeVices Chris is your friend huh? “laughable bunch of yuppies..,” Nice guy. He’s the new face of the The Loyolan, right?
Your comment wasn’t caustic. You made a good faith attempt to lay out your case and I respect that.
I do applications programming on the side so I’m certainly not a technophobe. Chris’s second paragraph above is verbatim. I think it states pretty clearly how he thinks.
If a six figure bill is what it takes to stop what are in many instances once weekly parties adjacent to their homes, then a six figure bill is what it takes. Bummer for the family that has to take the hit for the bill.
As I noted in my column, these parties occur on weekdays and on weekends. Many of them begin after midnight. After my kids are tucked in bed for a good nights sleep for school the next morning. All of a sudden in the middle of the night, we are awaken out of our sleep to the intrusion of loud shouting of tipsy and drunk college coeds and coolers repeated being opened and slammed shut.
This usually goes on for several hours and as a result nobody actually gets a good nights rest. Maybe you want to pay for my childs tutoring after a few months of not being pay attention in class and failing math?
LMU tells us their undergraduates are young people learning to be adults. This first lesson they should learn is to be responsible. Don’t do something away from home that you wouldn’t do at your parents home with your folks around. Responsible adults don’t repeatedly take advantage of their neighbors and hold parties once a week. Not even every other week or once every month. Once every three months..? We’ll talk about it.
Responsible adults tell their neighbors that they are going to have a party to give them an opportunity to step away from home for a few hours. Responsible adults don’t start parties after midnight. They also take it inside after 10:00pm on the weekdays, 11:00PM on weekends.
Responsible adults don’t urinate on the neighbors landscape or invite more people than the house can safely handle. They don’t leave beverage containers all over the street for others to pick up the next morning.
Westchester is not a college town, its a residential neighborhood with a college tucked within it. If its undergrads thought they were enrolling in a party school they picked the wrong school. Try San Diego State.
“Westchester is not a college town, its a residential neighborhood with a college tucked within it.”
No, that is where you are wrong. The neighborhood has been built around the university. The university was here long before the big tract house boom that made the neighborhood what we see today.
Someone having buyer’s remorse?
It doesn’t matter if LMU has been around since 1911. What matters is how long the stakeholders of the community have been around and how much they have invested individually in the community. Students for the most part are not long term community stakeholders. Their only real commitment is the tuition they pay and the time they spend here to get a degree. At best they’re here four years and they move back home or to careers elsewhere.
Residents however are here for decades and longer. They are the true stakeholders. They are raising kids here, paying 30 year mortgages or rents, they are attending public and private schools, going to church, the children are participating in sports…, There is no comparison between students and residents as to who the stakeholders are in terms of personal investment in the community.
One parent recently wrote me and said this: “Just because we have Ralphs doesn’t make it a shopping community. AYSO doesn’t mean it’s a Soccer Community, Visitation Church doesn’t means it’s a Catholic Community and the Adobe doesn’t mean it’s a historical landmark community.
To boil it down to its simplest terms, while LMU the institution is a revered long term stakeholder, your just a tuition paying customer at LMU.
Also, by your logic, families that are renting are not part of the community, they are just customers. I am sure that your non-student renting neighbors would love to hear how you think you are in a social class above them in the neighborhood. To further your flawed logic, you are just a mortgage paying customer in the neighborhood. You admit the university has been around longer, which is supported by the facts, then you try to frame the fact that you CHOSE to live near a university as unimportant. You CHOSE with your own free will to live in the community, maybe you should have done your research. No person with half a brain lives next to a university and expects what you are expecting.
I mentioned that renters are also stackholders in the second paragraph. I also don’t live next to the university. I’m well over a mile from it not that it matters.
I doesn’t matter however where people live. What matters is whether or not people, residents OR students are allowed to routinely disturb the normally peaceful quality of life in the community. Even homeowners are known to behave as badly and have frequent visits by law enforcement.
I’m a junior student at LMU living off campus and I just wanted to input a little bit. I live a little further from campus, so I have not experienced as much of this as some of you residents, but I will do my best.
I first want to make it clear that the ratio of problem-causing students in low. I agree that many of these students are out of hand. The problems are spawned from immaturity and irresponsibility. Yes, we are learning to become adults, but we aren’t yet adults (no matter what many of us believe). “Learning” is the key term here, and learning from mistakes is essential. We are going to be stupid and immature, but eventually we are going to grow out of it into responsible adults. These comments that it is going to be frightening when our generation is in power are just ignorant. You don’t know us. Even many of the craziest students are intelligent and good students. If we were going to be thrown into the “real world” during our freshman year, then yes, it would be scary. This is the time when we grow up. Give us a few years, and you’ll feel comfortable knowing we are the ones running businesses, designing/building your houses, and representing you in government. I can promise you that.
I was thinking about this today and I feel there may be negatives of going to the news that you may have not considered. By bringing this story to NBC, you now have a hand in making LMU look like a party school. LMU is far from a party school in my opinion, mostly because Westchester is NOT a college town. Morgantown, WV is a college town and WVU is a party school. LMU is not and will not ever be on that level. Anyway, my point is that high school students may now going to see all of this and get the wrong idea about LMU. Just something to think about – it could potentially result in more ridiculous kids in the future.
I don’t know what you have tried to solve the situation, but I would like to try and offer a little advice to Westchester residents. Most importantly, try to get to know these students living near you. Get to know them, trade numbers, whatever. Ask them to keep you updated as to when they are going to have people over. This way, if something gets a little to rowdy, you can talk to them about it in a friendly environment and attempt to diffuse the situation without LAPD or LMU.
I also feel that the whole micro-blogging thing has been taken out of context. I have never even heard of twitter until this fiasco. The number of students using this technology is very low I’m sure. And in regards to facebook, most people do not update their status religiously. It is definitely used for party planning, but usually not spontaneously. The officer in the NBC clip said that as soon as a party is broken up, he immediately sees all the students getting out their phones. This is accurate, but I don’t think the students are “networking.” In my experience, texts or calls in this situation usually consist of “party got rolled, I’m going home,” not browsing through the web on iphones to find the next party to go to.
Finally, I want to make a comment to the guy from the NBC clip you said that the students screamed obscenities at him when he takes pictures of them. I don’t know what the context of the situation, but I wouldn’t appreciate people taking pictures of me either. Its like you are a paparazzo. People hate paparazzi. Don’t take pictures of strangers and they won’t yell at you for it.
I like the Westchester neighborhood for its mix of families, married/single adult professionals without kids, college students, and senior citizens. I fall under the single adult professional group and purchased a house in this neighborhood for that reason. (Well, there are many other great reasons why I chose to leave Venice for Westchester.)
I don’t mind the college parties, just as I don’t mind the family parties, block parties, and weekend children’s sports games I see and hear. (It’s good to know there’s life and happiness behind these homes.) I throw parties and get togethers that can get loud, of which I try to be conscious of — for example, when it’s after 10p, close the windows or herd everyone to the inside of the house even when the bbq/bonfire or cool summer nights are better outdoors. I’ll apologize to my neighbors the following day if we were too loud for them. Luckily, they always say it’s okay or they don’t hear us at all. This allows me to understand what part of the house to avoid which will cause disturbance, and my neighbors know we always try to be conscious of the noise.
There’s a simple rule to keep in mind: Do whatever you want to do, make whatever noise you want to make, invite who you want to invite, throw as many parties you want to throw, stay up as long as you want… so long as you don’t cause pain to others or damage or dirty other people’s properties. And if you do, reach out and communicate with your neighbors, be accountable, and don’t be shy about apologizing. I, for one, would like to know everyone here loves living here for the reason that neighbors come up with ways to tolerate and live in the same neighborhood.
We are having the same problem in our neighborhood. Within the last year this family on our block has thrown a party at least once a month. The party usually starts around 9 p.m. and will go until about 1 or 2 a.m., depending on if the sheriff come out. We the neighbors often call the sheriff, but the sheriff just ask them to turn down the music. Within 5 minutes the party continues at the same level. The streets are blocked with cars coming to the party, kids are urinating on everyones lawn, there’s underage drinking, and in the morning there’s trash all over the street. Do these neighbors care? No! We have heard that the people throwing the party charge the partygoers to attend. We know that we cannot have a conversation with these people because they’re not the kind of people who will have a decent conversation with you. I just wanted to say thanks for all of the conversation. I was able to get some advice on how to possibly handle the situation.
Our block was the quietest last year that it’s ever been, and we’re hoping for the same peace and quiet this year. Neighbors banded together, called police regularly to shut parties down and finally took the step that had the biggest impact on shutting down parties — multiple neighbors sued the property owners of the worst party houses for maintaining and failing to abate a private nuisance. With the police responses logged, pictures of the parties and their aftermath, videotape, and multiple affidavits and witnesses to the chronic parties/disturbances, neighbors easily won their cases in small claims court. At that time, the maximum judgment was $5,000 (it’s now $7,500). One judgment might not be enough to encourage responsible behavior, but a property owner faced with three judgments (total $15,000 plust costs) and the potential for 39 more (42 neighbors signed the final letter warning that suits would be filed if the parties didn’t stop), the property owners who were sued suddenly took the situation seriously. We live near Occidental College, and have heard the same stories you have — it’s a college town, if you don’t like it – move, the party just got out of control, blah, blah, blah. Organize neighbors, log police calls and responses, document the parties and put property owners on notice — and then sue if they don’t listen!
Oh I cannot believe the person claiming to be a “Westchester parent’s) comments. Please, you must be a college kid. Let me explain with respect to you, what exactly happens when you ask kindly and treat the students with “respect”. I have lived behind a party house for 71/2 years. I have seen and heard it all. I have asked kindly, I have begged kindly, I have even been friendly after a full night of no sleep on a workday just to show my compassion. But you people smart back with comments like, “well that’s what you get for living in a college neighborhood”. Is that respectful to us? You throw your cans on our property, you have drunken sex between the houses (yes, we have seen it all). You scream out F. you (1000 times to each other) on the top of your lungs at 5 in the morning…and you want respect?
How can you regard people who sit on the roof of the house they are renting and drink beer and say four letter words while your 4 yr old is in her yard and comes in asking what those words mean? Talk about invasion of my life, my kids and my neighbors homes….get real DUDE.
I have come to the conclusion that LMU students are rude, completely feel entitled, and have little concern for others. I am sure that they are the product of day care where they never were taught how to get along with others or respect them, or even have the least bit of manners.
We are on the younger side, we loved to party in our day and we understand the need to socialize. But do it on campus. We have EARNED the right to live here. You are just transients, and rude ones at that. We pay property taxes. You don’t . We are grown up, this is where we have settled, you haven’t. You will be gone in a few years and we will have new “arrivals” more rude and arrogant than the last bunch.
So when the police show up and you have the audacity to tell them to get out and that they don’t have a warrant and to get off of YOUR property, know that the only thing you have EARNED is our complete disgust and don’t even think for a minute that you deserve any respect. And don’t tell me these examples are the exception. We have lived through THREE GRADUATING classes. We have such a low opinion of the students and school of LMU that it has become a joke for our kids as the bad example of what you don’t want to be when you grow up-a LMU student.