It’s a Thursday evening – a major party night during the school year – but its quieter at the bars in June, when most of the University students have returned home for the summer. But that doesn’t mean slow nights for officers in the Bowling Green Police Division.

I sat in the front seat of Unit 55 – a police cruiser for the BGPD – riding next to Officer Jason Broshious.

Broshious catches more drunk drivers than any other officer in town, according to supervising Officer Tony Hentrick.

He didn’t arrest any drunk drivers when I rode with him, though.

Broshious has been a police officer for six years, after working as a cop in the U.S. Air Force. Now he’s working on his bachelor’s degree at the University.

Broshious said that officers generally patrol the whole city, rather than sticking to assigned sections of the city. But all the officers do extra patrol checks in a ward of the city.

Tonight, Broshious was assigned Ward 4, which means keeping an eye on construction sites, business offices, and the homes of vacationing residents.

“Most people think if we work nights, all we deal with is college kids. . . . I definitely couldn’t say that the majority of our calls are college-related,” Broshious said.

At 11:20 p.m., we pull out of the station. Immediately, there is a call over the scanner that is positioned between us in the front seat of the cruiser. A neighbor called to complain about a noisy party.

We head to the call on South Church Street, where residents are “mostly townies, not too many students,” according to Broshious.

“Rentals are slowly moving to the west side of Main Street now, they never were before, but now they’re starting to reach that way. Not that I’m saying that’s what this [call] is, I’m just saying there’s a good chance,” Broshious said.

As it turned out, Broshious’ prediction was right.

We pulled up to a beautiful, recently restored, historical house with three college-aged tenants sitting, drinking beer on the porch. Officer Broshious and I walk across the perfectly manicured yard to where they are sitting.

He tells the three that a neighbor called to complain about a loud party. One of the tenants, a man, tells Broshious that he’s been sitting with two other guests outside.

Clearly, this was not a wild party.

“They always call when we sit on the porch,” the man said, referring to his neighbors.

Broshious did not give a citation, but asked the tenants to avoid confrontation with their neighbors. It would only make the situation worse to knock on their door to ask about the call, he said.

The tenants told Broshious that they would be walking downtown to bars, so there would be no contact with the neighbors.

We were not called back to the area again that evening.

“That’s the best when you get that call, of extremely large party, huge party, lots of people urinating, fighting. Then you get there, and its like three people on the porch,” Broshious said. “People make that a little bit better so you’ll show up quicker or something.”

But in Bowling Green, tricking the cops into showing up quickly is unnecessary. Broshious said that police response time is already quick in Bowling Green, unlike in bigger cities.

“Even on really, really busy nights, we’re there, [snaps fingers] like that. We don’t have calls backed up. We’re just not that busy, where we can’t respond to all of our calls,” he said.

And on busy nights, campus police help the BGPD.

“That’s what’s nice about this place: if you ever need another officer, they’re always there,” Broshious said.

At 11:35 p.m., we ride onto North Main Street towards downtown, and Broshious waves to two bike cops riding near the bars.

The BGPD counts on the bike cops for tips about drunk drivers and speeders, he said. But mostly, the bike cops ride around downtown Bowling Green to watch for bar fights.

“During the school year, we’ll have a couple guys on foot, or the bike guys at the library, watching Sky Bar and Howard’s. And we’ll have a couple guys in front of Pisanello’s, watching Uptown and Junction and Brathaus,” said Broshious.

Between calls, we drive through areas where students live off-campus during the summer, like the streets near campus, Sterling Enclave on Napoleon Road and the Bentwood/Burrwood neighborhood off South Mercer Road.

When we drive by at 11:54 p.m., Broshious points to the large open areas behind houses on Bentwood Lane.

“We’ve had some huge gatherings in those fields, public parties,’ he said.

Stopping those parties isn’t easy. Unlike in neighborhoods where city residents are likely to complain about rowdy gatherings; student neighbors are less likely to tip off the police when it comes to parties.

But that doesn’t mean that students can’t be neighborhood watchdogs.

“You remember the burglars we got last year” Broshious said. “They caught them down here. Two college kids on Brookwood [Drive] they saw a guy climbing in a window or something like that, called it out, and those were the guys.”

Burglary and vandalism are crimes that keep the BGPD busy over the summer, and during school breaks at the University.

We stop one pair of teenagers in a car, and they leave after Broshious talks to them.

Later, at 12:12 p.m., while driving on Manville, Broshious spots a car driving kind of wiggly near the center line. Broshious waits until he sees both tires cross the centerline, then pulls car over.

A college-aged woman is driving a man home from the bars. Broshious asks her if she’s had anything to drink, and she says no. He asks her again, and she tells him that she had a few earlier, at about 5 p.m. that evening.

He asks her to sit on the hood of his car, and follow his pen with her eyes. She agrees. Broshious offers to move the car to a nearby parking lot, which she agrees to do, and then he lets the couple leave on foot.

He said afterwards that he knew she had been drinking, but didn’t believe she was intoxicated.

But the driver had made one of the most common mistakes that Broshious looks for in drunk drivers: crossing the centerline.

“Everybody has their own little thing that they look for,” Broshious said. “The easiest obviously, is a quick violation. You know, something wrong with their vehicle, a headlight out, or most common downtown is someone with their headlights out all together. A lot of people just start it up, throw it in gear and take off. And once they get out of downtown, its dark, you’re driving around with no headlights on. That’s pretty common.”

At 12:19 p.m., Broshious pulls another car over, this time near the south side of Main Street. When he tells the driver that his brake lights are broken, the driver asks to see. Broshious demonstrates, pushing the brake of the parked car, while the driver stands outside and watches.

Broshious let the driver go with a warning.

The drivers of both cars were not drunk, Broshious said. But when he’s patrolling for drunk drivers, he’s equally suspicious of both college-age and older drivers.

“We just started recording a lot of our [drunk drivers] OVI’s information – like what they test, the last bar they were at, all that information – and they were really surprised to see that a lot of our OVI’s are older people.”

Read about the rest of our ride-along with the BGPD in the second part in this story in next week”s issue of the BG News.