Although the stated goal of the Student Neighborhood Assistance Program is to protect students’ safety, for most students, the sight of SNAP’s flashing yellow lights is a distressing one. On Thursday and weekend nights around Georgetown, SNAP is more often seen as a dour party police. By minimizing the interactions between Georgetown students and the Metropolitan Police Department, SNAP serves a legitimate purpose within the West Georgetown and Burleith neighborhoods. But the program has some unfortunate policies too, such as breaking up parties when there has been no complaint from neighbors, which must end.
Without SNAP, much of the off-campus noise related to student parties would be dealt with by MPD. While the party probations and work sanction hours doled out by the Office of Campus Life may seem unfair, they are better than the alternative: serious fines and possible arrests. The program is particularly valuable given the new noise ordinances in place that conceivably allow MPD officers to arrest anyone who makes an unreasonably loud noise between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
But there are some serious problems with the opaque manner in which the program is run. SNAP’s decisions about which parties to break up can be arbitrary and overly strict. Without a clear standard for what constitutes a violation, students hosting parties can never be sure when the wrath of SNAP will fall on them. Their habit of citing and punishing students whose parties did not elicit a complaint targets students who are socializing responsibly. By shutting down parties that make only moderate amounts of noise, SNAP interference punishes students partying responsibly and concentrates student revelers at the few remaining parties, creating legitimate noise problems.
Perhaps a bigger problem, though, is the punishment students face after they receive a visit from SNAP. SNAP’s “proactive” approach—which busts parties before receiving any noise complaint from neighbors—punishes students for a victimless crime. Anne Koester, Director of Off-Campus Student Life, has the final say when doling out punishments that stem from SNAP visits. The appeals process is even more problematically cryptic—sanctioned students report being given no substantive details about the process. When contacted, Koester refused to clarify how appeal cases are handled.
While SNAP could be seen as an advocate for and protector of students, its vague standards and mysterious operating procedures instead make it inimical to student life. Georgetown should lay out standard operating procedures, including clear guidelines for what constitutes unacceptable noise levels. Furthermore, SNAP needs to avoid breaking up parties that have not received complaints from neighbors and instead focus on prompt responses to actual problems. With some compromises, SNAP’s yellow beacons won’t have to be a red light for reasonable student parties.
