Coalition News

Strafford County Underage Drinking Enforcement Grant

By Roland Morin

This is the second year that the Strafford County Sheriff’s Office has been awarded a grant from ONE Voice of Southeastern NH in support of Underage Drinking Enforcement Teams. This year there are eight agencies/communities participating including, Barrington, Strafford, Northwood, New Durham, Milton, Wakefield, Middleton, and Farmington. The towns will provide underage drinking enforcement initiatives in the form of party patrols and controlled party dispersal response. Local Police Officers work with Sheriff Deputies when accomplishing both types of enforcement initiatives. The grant funds the salaries of the law enforcement personnel and the Strafford County Sheriff’s Office manages the grant.

The basic premise of Controlled Party Dispersal is to dedicate appropriate available resources to contain underage drinking party participants, identify adult providers and effectively control the release of party participants. When a Strafford County law enforcement agency has identified or received credible and verifiable information of an underage drinking party and they anticipate the need for additional resources, they notify the Strafford County Sheriff’s Office in order to initiate the Controlled Party Dispersal Response Plan. Those officers and deputies that respond have received certified training in the nationally recognized response plan. The funding for the training and the salaries of the responding officers/deputies is provided by ONE Voice. Currently, we will be providing the party dispersal training for the county and local law enforcement dispatchers in May. The party patrol teams maintain primarily an enforcement posture, but they also make contacts with the public in an attempt to impress upon the underage persons and their parents the importance of eliminating the availability of alcohol to the underage persons.

In addition to providing instruction and overseeing the party response training for personnel, we maintain agency-wide standard operating procedures that address minors and alcohol related offenses and have mutual aid agreements with the identified law enforcement agencies. We also assist the local departments with policy development, oversee compliance to the terms and conditions of the grant, submit financial and programmatic reports, and ensure reimbursement of funds to participating agencies.