In this college town, the streets of Bowling Green are noticeably less crowded during the summer, when most University students are gone. But the officers of the Bowling Green Police Division say that they are just as busy during the summer months as they are the rest of the year. For city police, the difference is that summer brings different crimes–not fewer of them.

The BG News recently rode along with the BGPD on a typical summer night, during their busiest times: 11 p.m. until 3 a.m.

We rode with Officer Jason Broshious, who’s a cop in the BGPD. Broshious has worked nights as a police officer for six years. He grew up in Toledo with two brothers, and now both brothers also work as cops in the area. Broshious is now finishing his bachelor’s degree at the University in criminal justice and sociology, but he said he will continue to work as a cop because he “couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”

We cruise through City Park at 12:39 a.m. looking for couples that stop after dark to smooch or fool around in their cars.

“Here, you’ll catch adults too,” Broshious said. “But on the west end [of the city] its mostly high schoolers.”

We stop one pair of teenagers in a car, and they leave after Broshious talks to them. We stick around for a few minutes while Broshious checks the park bathrooms. The park bathrooms have been repeatedly vandalized all summer. Police find broken toilets, spray paint on the walls, and empty beer cans in the stalls.

At 12:44 p.m., we drive down Conneaut Avenue to check on a vacationer’s empty home. Broshious said that police keep an eye on homes and construction sites at slow times of the nights between calls. Sometimes, construction workers will leave the vehicle keys in the cab of their heavy machinery. And the next morning, the machine won’t be where the worker left it. Some drunk or bored person will have moved the machine.

So, we keep an eye out for people hanging around construction sites after dark.

As we cruise through the area west of Main Street, where many residents live, Broshious noted that many residents make the same mistakes as the construction workers who leave the keys in their machinery overnight.

We see cars parked on the street, with the windows rolled down. Those cars are easy targets for thieves, Broshious said.

“I never understood that, why people leave their doors unlocked,” he said.

Broshious said that even in a small place like Bowling Green, it is important for everyone to lock the doors of their cars and homes.

Burglary is popular in the summertime. Consider last year’s numbers of burglaries.

Crime numbers are recorded in quarters. The third quarter includes the summer months of July, August, and the beginning of school in September.

The 2004 third quarter recorded a total of seven burglaries. Only one of those didn’t happen in July, a popular vacation time for residents and students. So, there were six burglaries in July 2004–which was more than any other month that year.

There were also seven burglaries in the first quarter of this year, which includes January, February, and March 2005. There were three burglaries in January, a month when many people travel for the winter holiday. By comparison, there were no burglaries in February 2005, when most students and residents are still in town. Four of the 2005 first quarter burglaries happened in March, when many people travel for spring break.

December is another month that puts homeowners and renters at risk for burglaries. There were three burglaries in December 2004.

We hear another call over the scanner at 1:19 a.m. Shots were fired at a home, just blocks away from the northwest side of campus.

I stand across the street from the house, while Broshious joins the four other officers already on the scene.

A neighbor said he heard gunshots, and saw a black Ford Explorer driving past the home of several college-aged men. He was especially concerned, because a family with small children lives beside that house, he told Broshious.

After Broshious talked to the other officers, he motioned for me to follow him.

All the lights were on at the house, and the residents denied that they heard gunshots. They told police they had heard a bang, but described the noise as “fireworks.”

Police did not find any shell casings in the front yard. Shell casings are remnants of bullets fired. They did, however, find a slow leak and small hole in the tire of a vehicle in the driveway of the house. But, there wasn’t enough evidence to confirm that the tire had been punctured by a bullet.

The residents of the house said they did not want to file a police report, so at 1:40 a.m., we left the house.

Afterwards, we pull into a parking lot at Thurstin and Wooster streets, to powwow with two officers in another cruiser. They chat for a few minutes with Broshious about the calls that evening. Broshious seemed frustrated about the last one, and the fact that the residents would not file a police report. He said that there is little the police can do, if people don’t want their help.

“The problem is a lot of [people] will have a bad experience with police–whether it be our department or somewhere else–and then when they do need us, they don’t feel the need to call us. They had that bad experience, and they don’t think we’re going to help them,” he said.

At 2:24 a.m., there is a call that a parked car was hit behind the bar, Uptown/Downtown, and the person at fault drove away.

Hit-and-runs are a personal pet peeve of Broshious, who said that those type of accidents usually can be blamed on a drunk driver.

“The majority [of hit-and-run accidents] are at night, obviously I’d say there’s a pretty good reason they’re hit-skips. They get stopped, and they’re drunk. We’ve had some really bad crashes downtown, [with drivers] extremely intoxicated.”

University police catch the suspect on South Mercer Road minutes later, and as Broshious predicted, the driver was drunk.

The city police recorded 53 DUI arrests in summer months in the third quarter of 2004. But, city police seem to be less busy with DUI arrests during the summer than months when school is in session.

There were 91 DUIs in the first quarter of 2004, during the months of January, February and March.

And there were 76 DUIs during the second quarter in 2004, a time when spring semester is winding down during the months of April, May, and June.

There were 63 DUIs in the fourth quarter of 2004–with nearly half of those (28) in December 2004.

However, the numbers did not differentiate between how many of those arrested are BGSU students and how many are local residents.

Also, some of those DUIs may have been people from out of town. Broshious said that people travel from places like Toledo and Findlay to hit the bars here.

Some of the out of towners have talked to Broshious. They say that Bowling Green is a popular place to party, because a guy can “buy three or four ladies some drinks” for the cost of the cover charges at trendy bars in and around Toledo, Broshious said.

“BG is like Mardi Gras,” Broshious said, referring to the city’s downtown bars, which are all within walking distance of each other.