By Amanda Conley | November 4, 2024
Photo Credit: Pixabay
It is a busy night; countless cars circle the block of Hudson and Hamilton, looking for an empty space to park. A posse of three young men walk down the sidewalk, each with a 24-pack of beer nestled under their arms.
They are among the thousands of UAlbany students swarming the streets of Pine Hills. The hustle and bustle of students reuniting with old friends, setting up beer pong tables sandwiched between the sidewalk, and sauntering across Quail Street just to get a taste of 212 Marketplace chicken. The mood of the crowd is light and fizzing with energy, the stress of tests, quizzes and 1,000-word papers nowhere in sight.
But some students will have other stressors on their mind by the end of the night.
With the college semester in full swing, the Albany Police Department (APD) is prepared for the new slew of student activity on the one-block radius on the streets Hamilton and Hudson, between Quail and Ontario. Towering spotlights blind spectators, illuminating the dark uniforms of law enforcers and the ongoings of underage drinkers. Darkness only swells behind the frat houses that line both sides of Hudson Street.
At one frat, a group of young men stand on a rickety porch overlooking the scene, asking partygoers for their ID’s before entering the house. One looks off into the distance down Hudson Ave., squinting his eyes.
Promptly and without warning, he snatches the red solo cup from the hand of his friend, flips it and pours the liquid into the innocent shrubbery nestled against the porch on the other side of the railing.
“Hey, why did you do that?” the friend asked, bewildered.
“The police are handing out tickets down there,” he said, pointing further down the street.
A few hundred feet away, on a patch of dried grass on the side of a white house, an officer issues a handwritten ticket to a student for underage drinking. The student accepts it, his face serious as he listens to the officer whose words are barely audible over the music blasting through the windows of the house.
APD selects their team to patrol the area, just as they have done in all the previous years. They call this a “detail,” where officers sign up or are mandated to work in this area, strictly to ensure that the students are maintaining a safe and contained environment.
“You can’t measure prevention,” one officer on detail told me on a recent Friday night. “You can’t say ‘what would have happened’ if we weren’t there. But I feel like we keep the students safer.”
Some students find their presence comforting.
On the corner of Hudson and Quail, five young women in matching red crop tops stand for a minute, taking in the cool night air after leaving a swamped frat house. One blonde woman sees an officer on the other side of the street.
He stands in a dark corner with his partner watching the mass of students as he murmurs something incoherent to the other.
“God forbid anything were to happen in the streets,” the woman says to her friends as she lets out a deep breath, “at least we know they are there.”
Police have always been here, in Pine Hills, but their presence became greater about over a decade ago, when the Kegs and Eggs riot altered the mindsets of local police and the administration of the University at Albany.
In 2011, on St. Patrick’s Day weekend, students in a drunken haze flooded the streets, throwing furniture off balconies, destroying property, and assaulting officers. Air conditioners and television sets plummeted overhead from second floor balconies, glass bottles littered the streets, and students jumped and danced on the hoods of cars.
The neighborhood has been a mixture of rowdy and calm over time after Kegs and Eggs, but on Aug. 28, 2022, on the corner of Hamilton and Quail, in the heady days after students returned to campus following the pandemic, the area was again the scene of rowdy crowd behavior. As police attempted crowd control in the area, students became increasingly aggressive with officers and each other, and then several shots were fired seemingly out of nowhere.
However, there are other reasons for the police being out tonight. On an average weekend, calls to police of stabbings, fights, illegal gun possession or shots fired are not uncommon. According to police, there are about five to ten fights each weekend, one robbery and one ‘shots fired’ call or stabbing once a month in the Pine Hills area.
On the grass at the corner of Hudson and Ontario, a young man and his friends sit to eat chicken wings and fries from 212 take-out containers, occasionally taking sips of alcohol from his Blue Moon.
“Well, they don’t bother anybody,” a young man said of the police standing nearby. He takes a long drag from his vape.
Bother or not, the police will remain a fixture in Pine Hills, as permanent as the neighborhood street signs. “Our job is to go where the people are,” one officer told me on a Saturday night.
On another night, two young women walk down the sidewalk on Hudson Ave. with open cans of White Claws in hand. A pair of officers coming from the opposite direction notice the young women and continue to head toward them. Muffled jargon erupts from their radios and the police tilt their heads in unison to listen.
They cross the street and head in another direction. In the distance, they can hear the words “fight, fight, fight!” rise to crescendo from a crowd of students standing in the middle of Quail Street. One of the officers sprints down the sidewalk toward the crowd.
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