By Eric Tucker
Associated Press
NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — The punishment, renters and homeowners in this beach town say, is tantamount to a scarlet letter: A large orange sticker plastered by police on homes that host raucous parties.
Police have cited more than 300 homes since 2005 under a town law aimed at curbing rowdy gatherings - especially among off-campus students from the nearby University of Rhode Island - and helping officers and neighbors more easily flag problem properties.
A federal judge will hear arguments next month on a lawsuit from students who liken the stickers to degrading “scarlet letters” - stigmatizing labels of literary lore worn by adulterous women - that shame them before the neighborhood and leave them vulnerable to repeat visits from the police.
“Once you have the sticker, you’re basically assumed guilty of everything that happens in the neighborhood,” said Michael Spatcher, 21, a URI student whose rental house was given an orange sticker last year after a party and who is among those pressing a judge to nix the law.
The ordinance allows police to place 10-inch-by-14-inch stickers on properties where parties of five or more people created a “substantial disturbance” through loud noise, public drunkenness, illegal parking or other such behavior.
The first sticker serves as a warning, though the next noise violation carries a fine of $300.
And the stickers must remain up for the duration of the school year or summer, depending on when they were given out.
J. David Smith, who was police chief when the law was enacted, said the stickers were generally given out after excessively loud or offensive parties. They were intended to warn the tenants against hosting future bashes - and to make guests think twice about partying there.
“The vast majority of them were that the parties did not heed the warnings, did not quiet down, did not disperse, waited for the officers to leave and then came back worse than ever,” said Smith, who retired and now heads Rhode Island’s Emergency Management Agency.
The law was modeled after a similar ordinance in Tucson, Ariz., intended to rein in underage drinking among University of Arizona students, said Tucson city prosecutor Alan Merritt.
Other cities, including Milwaukee and Dayton, Ohio, allow so-called shaming signs to be placed on properties whose owners have ignored warnings to bring them up to code.
Landlords - who also are sent notice of the stickers - are fighting the law, too, saying they’re being held responsible for behavior over which they have no control.
Walter Manning said he returned from a vacation last year to find an orange sticker posted on a ranch house he was renting to four URI students. He said he struggled for months to find new tenants for the next year - he believes because of the sticker’s stigma - ultimately renting the house to a young family.
“This law seems to think that I’m an adoptive parent of these children or young adults,” Manning said. “It unfairly labels me, as a landlord, as someone doing something wrong.”
Spatcher, the URI student, received a sticker after a January 2008 house party that drew the police following a fistfight outside.
David Keach, a fellow URI student who moved into the house later that year, said he believes the sticker put the property on the police department’s radar, encouraging officers to find additional infractions. Months later, the tenants were each fined $300 after another house party, though that penalty is being appealed.
The stickers, Keach said, are to say “that these people are disturbing the peace, they’re a public nuisance.”
“But who’s to say that?” he asked. “The police? They’re the ones who decide who’s the public nuisance? Shouldn’t it be the people who live right next to them? Shouldn’t it be the people ... actually affected by it?”
Current police chief Joseph Little declined to comment as did a lawyer for the town, Marc DeSisto. But DeSisto has said in court papers that the stickers’ stigma is not great enough to make the ordinance unconstitutional.
“Although a ‘Nuisance House List’ with specific addresses has been maintained, no photographs, names or addresses are circulated to other neighbors,” DeSisto wrote.
The police, meanwhile, have continued to distribute the stickers while the court case continues, including one last month for an underage keg party involving a game of “beer pong.”
Stephen Garvey, a Cornell University law school professor, said the stickers seemed like a relatively “benign” form of public shaming. But he said the ordinance could run afoul if students were being punished without having a chance to prove their innocence.
“It’s punishment without any process,” Garvey said. “There’s no conviction, there’s not a trial, it’s just the police punishing people.”
Ken Simone, 34, a school teacher from Narragansett, said irritating, early morning house parties are a persistent problem in the neighborhood despite the sticker ordinance. He laughed off the notion that the stickers were a stigma for students, saying it seemed to rile them instead.
But he offered a simple solution for student partyers.
“If they don’t want the stickers on their door,” he said, “just keep it down a little bit.”