MIDDLETOWN — Middletown and Newport are among the communities with the worst teen drinking statistics in Rhode Island, and in this case, to the poor go the spoils. Combined, the two municipalities are receiving $931,500 for teen drinking prevention efforts over a three-year period.

The money is being used to educate police officers and parents, to engage young people, and to send extra police patrols into the streets and onto the beaches.

According to the state, both Newport and Middletown have a problem, which is why they were targeted by the R.I. Executive Office of Health and Human Services to receive Strategic Prevention Framework State Incentive Grants, according to Lori Verderosa, Middletown Substance Abuse Prevention Task Force coordinator.

“They called us and said your stats pose the greatest burden to the state’s statistics,” she said.

To reach that conclusion, the health and human services department examined DUI arrests, SALT survey data (from the School Accountability for Learning and Teaching survey administered to all Rhode Island students), substance abuse treatment facilities admission data, and justice commission data (alcohol and tobacco purchasing data, juvenile hearing board data) and qualitative soft data (focus groups and key informant interviews from police, school officials and town officials). They compiled the data into a community needs assessment.

The SALT data revealed that “Middletown kids felt that drinking is no big deal,” said Ms. Verderosa. “Kids today drink to get wasted. They are not social drinking.”

The Middletown Substance Abuse Task Force received $435,500 and Newport received $496,000 to use toward police training, enforcement, equipment, training for local liquor stores and establishments, school training and media — getting the word out. The grant money is released over the three-year period from July 2007 to June 2010.

“At the back end of this, you have to show population change — a decrease of alcohol use in our minors,” Ms. Verderosa said.

Ms. Verderosa feels Middletown has to decrease alcohol access. Teens can get alcohol from their older siblings, shoulder taps (“Hey mister can you get me a six pack?”), parents’ liquor cabinets, and retail access.

“We have to impact access and availability in order to get at the usage,” she said.

Party prevention training

Earlier this summer, Middletown and Newport police officers took part in a party prevention training program featuring a Middletown mother with a poignant story to tell. As Linda Chaves told the tragic story of her son, Charlie, even the tough cops in the room had some moist eyes.

Ms. Chaves’ son, Charlie, was starting his freshman year at Plymouth State College, when the 18-year-old Middletown High School graduate went to an on-campus party on Oct. 4, 2001. Late that night, after drinking at the party, he decided to go for a drive and crashed into a tree. He died at the scene of the crash.

“When there is a death involved, they don’t call. They knock on the door,” said Ms. Chaves, speaking of the night she found out her son had died.

“A Middletown officer came and knocked at the door at 1 a.m. and woke up my husband and informed him that Charlie had died. The Middletown officer drove him down to Newport Hospital, where I was working in the ER. I wasn’t paying attention when they walked up the hall. The secretary said that you need to take care of this now. I looked up and saw the officer and behind the officer was my husband (They are now divorced). When I looked at him, he was crying like a baby, his hands shoved into his pockets. I was bewildered. I had no clue that they were going to deliver that kind of news. My first instinct was to run to my son. I was not hearing that my son was dead. I was hearing that he was badly injured and he needed me, so I started to run out of the hospital and some doctors and nurses grabbed me and stopped me from running out. All I had in my mind was I had to get out of there and get to him. A three-hour trip.”

Ms. Chaves started off the training program to set a tone for the officers.

”To kind of give them a reason of why they are there. I told them who my son was. He was not a bad kid, he was just not one of the lucky ones,” said Ms. Chaves.

She was devastated and remained out of work for three months after Charlie’s accident, but it took only two nights back on third-shift at Newport Hospital for Ms. Chaves to come face-to-face with a teen on alcohol who needed her help.

“Portsmouth police brought in a drunk kid and he locked eyes with me. ‘Do you believe these (swear) pigs pulled me over.’ He kept repeating the phrase. I fell back against the wall. Tears streaked down my cheeks and I started to shake,” Ms. Chaves said and asked herself, “Do I share my story with this kid?”

“I told him that I wish there had been one police officer that had pulled my son over that night. My angels of mercy are those officers. They need to pull these kids over. If they had pulled over my son, he would be alive today. He did not plan to go out and kill himself that night, but he did.”

Connecticut state trooper has the answers

Later in the training program, a video of a teen drinking at a party played on a screen in front of 50-plus officers. The glossy-eyed teen sitting in a chair against a wall was so drunk that he began to puke into his beer. When he finished vomiting, he unknowingly took sips from that same beer.

The video was taken at a party dispersal and is now used as a training tool by Connecticut state trooper Chris Bartolotta of the Underage Drinking and Enforcement Center. The Middletown Substance Abuse Task Force brought him in using grant money, to train police on compliance checks, party prevention and controlled party dispersals. He also shared stories from his own experiences.

Trooper Bartolotta told a story of a party dispersal that he was a part of years ago. Police came in loud, with sirens blaring. Kids were fleeing from the party. In a parking lot, trooper Bartolotta was checking out one kid by his car. The kid had been drinking, but the trooper was going to let him go. The kid got into his car and started it up. Just as he was going to pull away, the trooper reached in and grabbed the keys. He had spotted another kid under the car. The driver’s buddy had fled from the party earlier and had passed out under the car while hiding from police.

“If I had let him go, he would have killed his buddy. We both would have been in a lot of trouble,” Trooper Bartolotta said, adding that he brought them both in to the station.

“To control the party, you want to go in quiet and coral them, to help keep everybody safe,” he said. “Drinking is not seasonal. Kids are drinking year round and at a younger age. It’s not occasional. The U.S. also has higher teen pregnancy rates that rival third world countries. There has been a huge (cultural) change.”

A cultural change

Lt. Robert Nutt, a police officer with Middletown for 18 years, shared the Connecticut trooper’s views.

“When I first came onto the force, there would be a couple of kids in the woods with a six-pack. Now, kids are more sophisticated. They have keg stands, beer funnels, harder liquor, and they don’t just take a few sips. They power down the liquor. They are definitely smarter about it (having parties), and there is more there. There isn’t always drugs at the parties, but always a variety of alcohol. Hard liquor, beer, wine, everything. More kids are drinking and it is more accepted by the community. It’s definitely a bigger problem than we realized and it has to be addressed.”

As a city, “we have been dealing with it longer,” said Lt. William Fitzgerald of Newport Police Department. “The two towns train together at times. It’s a small island.”

Newport uses a combination of enforcement and educational components to combat underage drinking.

“We have a very good relationship with our liquor establishments,” he said. Newport trains liquor establishments by teaching compliance checks, ID training and serve-safe training.

“They know not to serve people who have had too much,” he said, adding, “We have come a long way, but with 39 arrests (minors in possession of alcohol) this year, there is more to do. We have a commitment to the schools and parents, too.”

Newport police put on proactive, safe family events each year, so for a few nights each year they can’t say, “We have nothing to do.”

“We have a ton of programs, but we can’t do this alone. We have to have a partnership with the community,” said Lt. Fitzgerald.

The state grants are providing both police departments with a cash flow for teen drinking patrols. The grants pays officers overtime for the details. The police pick and choose their spots to use party patrols, on perhaps St. Patrick’s Day or Labor Day weekend. On a nice, 80-degree day, they may hit the sand for a beach patrol.

Beach patrol

Second Beach in Middletown was densely populated as a warm light breeze stirred up the sand. A boy in a Spiderman swimsuit threw sand at a seagull. The hot, golden sand sifted through a girl’s bare feet as she ran to the water.

Two Middletown police officers, Lt. Kelly Mitchell and officer Frank Lema, walked out to the beach incognito. Lt. Mitchell was in a blue polo with white shorts and a baseball hat, and officer Lema wore a checkered polo, kaki shorts, sunglasses and a towel around his neck. Both wore their standard duty belts — consisting of a 45-caliber, semi-automatic pistol, pepper spray, expandable baton, radio and handcuffs — under their shirts.

The beach routinely announces a public service message to visitors that talks about sunscreen and other health factors. At the end of the message the announcement states, “There is no public drinking at the beach. Police will prosecute.”

The officers made their way to the water, walking past a cluster of multi-colored beach umbrellas. Four girls in bikinis put down their beach blanket and headed for the water, where a boy was digging a trench around himself. The officers weren’t there to go swimming, they were looking for teens drinking or smoking on the beach, in the parking lots, or in the woods surrounding the beach. There are a lot of teens in the crowd. None appeared to be drinking.

“Red cups are a dead give-away,” said officer Lema.

“Most of the time you can walk right up to them. You can see the beer and how young they look,” Lt. Mitchell observed.

“We caught one kid smoking a pipe on the rocks (at Second Beach). He had just taken a toke,” said officer Lema.

“We had just walked up to them and he was holding his breath in, and I said, ‘You can let it out now,’ ” added Lt. Mitchell, pretending to cough up smoke.

“Sometimes they hide the coolers in the sand under their chairs,” said officer Lema, “but for some reason, they all drink out of those plastic red cups.”

Two teen girls, one in a heart polka dot bikini, the other wearing big sunglasses, looked on as the officers found three heavy-set gentlemen drinking on the beach. They giggled as they watched the officers use the PBT’s on the men to check their alcohol level, take pictures of the evidence and hand out $100 citations to each of them.

“We use the PBT’s to check their levels. If they are too high, we make sure they don’t drive. We try to find one guy who didn’t drink. If they are under 21, we either bring them to the station or have their parents pick them up here at the beach. We have to physically release them to a parent or guardian. We want them to be safe,” said Lt. Mitchell.

The officers ran into beach manager Tim Coen at the pavilion. He thanked them for the work that they did earlier in the season.

“What you did earlier in the year has made a difference on the beach.”

Two teen lifeguards were eating fish and chips and a wrap for lunch in a small room under the pavilion.

“I’ve seen the cops taking people off the beach,” said Aimee O’Neil of Middletown.

“A lot of teens drink in no man’s land, between tower 9 and surfer’s end (referring to a piece of land that isn’t covered by the lifeguards at the beach). That’s where most of the them go,” said Christine Woolbright of Middletown. “There are less people and less little kids.”

“Drinking has definitely picked up in town. We have seen a lot of underage drinking at house parties,” said Ms. Woolbright, adding, “My older sisters drank a little in high school, but now it seems kids are starting earlier and more are doing it.”

Ms. O’Neil agreed. “It’s everywhere. Knowing that there is a chance that you can get caught is a deterrent, but not until someone close to them gets caught.”

The officers went into the parking lot to check for kids in cars. They caught a whiff of marijuana and glanced at each other. They swung into action and began looking for the source of the smell. Officer Lema climbed over a fence into the sand dunes and tall grass. He combed the hills, but to no avail.

“Most of them are really good kids. Some are just making poor decisions,” said Lt. Mitchell, as they walked back to their blue Ford Taurus Se and on to the next beach.

Ms. Chaves, in a phone interview, echoed the Middletown officer’s message.

“None of these kids are bad kids. They all belong somewhere. They have families that worry about them. We aren’t supposed to bury our kids as parents. After they have gone, we can’t get them back. I still have Charlie’s things in a room, but I don’t have him back. The officers, what they are doing is important. They’d rather pull up to a scene and hand someone a citation than have someone dead in a crashed car.”

Ms. Chaves ends her cell phone message with, “... and please stay safe.”