Students have begun voicing their opposition against the Grant County Party Patrol, which has busted several parties in the past month, on the social networking Web site Facebook.

Several groups have been created by frustrated students, including “UW-Platteville Party Patrol Sucks,” which has almost 250 members. The students involved feel the party patrol is a waste of the police’s time.

“I feel that it is an easy way for them to make a lot of money in one weekend,” sophomore criminal justice major Trevor Kearney said. “They should be focusing on more important situations that occur everyday such as: Break-ins, rapes, and cracking down on some of the drug dealers.”

Platteville Police Chief Doug McKinley said the party patrol has not affected their ability to do other police work.

“We aren’t doing this at the expense of other activities,” McKinley said.

The Facebook group focuses on the anger that members have against the Party Patrol. It allows students to publicize their comments for all UW-P students to read. More than 200 students have joined this group in just a few weeks.

“I am not surprised that there are a lot of people in the group because of the amount of underages given at parties,” sophomore elementary education major Alicia Cleland said. “It used to be that the police would just ask everyone to leave.”

A large percentage of the members of the group are under the age of 21 or have already received an underage ticket.

“If the drinking age was 18 or even 19, there would be no need to give out tickets for the college students that are not being reckless,” elementary education major Benjamin Kisling said. “They could patrol for the protection of the students rather than to try to deter drinking, and I also think that in the long run if the drinking age was lowered that it would reduce dangerous drinking practices because it would lose the thrill of breaking the law.”

McKinley said the Party Patrol is important to keeping order and protecting students and other citizens.

“We view this as a tatic to reduce the frequncey and number of large scale parties because these large scale parties result in a lot of damage, fights, noise complaints, and on the darker side some sexual assaults,” McKinley said.

There are indications that the Party Patrol’s increase in busts is reducing the number of underage parties in the area. Michael Wagner, a senior international business major, said he has seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of large parties.

“There are parties out there, but they are just invite only or very low key,” Wagner said. “There are not a lot of open parties anymore. There is too much risk now.”

McKinley said this reduction in large parties is exactly what the party patrol is trying to accomplish.

“If I have a small party, there is some kind of social control because they know and respect me, the owner,” McKinley said. “You get these big parties and people don’t have those restraints, and people don’t care if they break things or get into fights.”

Wagner said that he understands what the party patrol is doing, but beleives that parties are part of college life, and that these busts are taking a casual drinking environment, and making it a paranoid drinking environment.

“I think it will create problems in the end,” Wagner said. “Instead of the busts, where the police would come in and tell everyone to orderly leave and ticket the house owners, they are ticketing everyone. In this new environment, people are going to run, evade cops, cause more damage and decrease safety.” Wagner said this takes a bad situation and makes it even worse.