At 12:30 early Sunday morning on Oct. 10, squad car 567 flies through town at 80 miles per hour to come to the aid of Andy Metcalfe, an Ames Police officer who has two males down on the ground with their hands on their heads.

Patrolman Jeff Brinkley, the driver of squad car 567, exits his vehicle and walks toward the scene.

“Ames 127, we are code 4, code 4,” Brinkley said to the dispatcher through the radio hooked onto his shoulder.

“10-4, 7, you’re code 4 — Ames 108?” the dispatcher responds.

“There’s no problem; we’ve got everything under control,” Cpl. Howard Snider replies.

“10-4.”

Five squad cars had arrived at the scene to offer assistance, although it was not needed since neither of the two captured men were armed.

One of the men, an 18-year-old clad in baggy pants and a gray and blue horizontal-striped shirt, was less than happy to be staring a public intoxication charge in the face.

“I’m a gangster for life. Fuck man, you’re a punk. Shit!” the young man shouts with his hands behind his back, handcuffs clenched tightly.

“Knock off the gangster stuff, all right. I’m not impressed,” Snider says.

“Geeeez lou-eez, man. You hard, ain’t you dawg?”

“Relax homes,” Brinkley responds in Snider’s defense.

“Man, Jeff, help me out dawg,” the man says to Brinkley.

“I ain’t helping you out of this one.”

“There ain’t no helping nobody out,” an officer standing nearby says.

Snider and Brinkley put the young man, who is still in handcuffs, into the back seat of squad car 567. The door shuts, leaving the young man locked inside.

The officers do a thorough search of the man’s Oldsmobile before they return to the squad car to get the keys to open the trunk for inspection. The inspection is cut short.

“He just took off on you!” an officer says, pointing at the car.

“What’s that?” Brinkley says.

“He just took off on you!”

The young man had slipped a cuff, reached around the cage of the squad car and rolled the rear window down to escape the locked police car.

The squad cars squealed off, and the search was on.

Although an escape from police custody does not occur every weekend, arrests for public intoxication are a common occurrence for local law enforcement agencies.

More arrests were made for public intoxication than for any other crime in the city of Ames from January 1998 to June 1999, according to the monthly statistical report from the Ames Police Department.

In fact, from the beginning of 1999 through the month of June, there were more than 168 public intoxication arrests, and that’s only a small percentage of those who are drunk, said Ames Police Chief Dennis Ballantine.

“In the large scale, we’re sitting where our manpower is stretched; we can’t arrest everybody — that’s impossible,” said Sgt. Randy Kessel, public information officer for the Ames Police Department. “Like the riots, we couldn’t arrest everyone who was guilty of something. We just take the ones closest to us.”

And even those people don’t get snatched up and cited unless they are observed in a bar under the legal age, consuming in public or drawing attention to themselves by shouting such things as “Hey pig!” across a crowded bar, said Snider, a member of the Special Operations Unit at the Ames Police Department.

“Some people are just obviously impaired — they’re passed out, drunk, staggering or can’t stand up on their own,” Snider said. “Over and above that, they do something dumb to draw your attention to them.”

Snider said it would take an impossible number of officers to arrest everyone who was publicly intoxicated.

“We definitely need more officers than we have now,” he said. “We would need a bigger jail, a bigger police force and more paddy wagons. The logistics of it — if you went out on a Friday night and tried to arrest every intoxicated person in every bar, it’s just impossible.”

The Ames Police Department usually has five or six officers on the street on a given night, unless there is a big event occurring on campus that warrants increasing those numbers, Ballantine said.

Snider said he doesn’t arrest every intoxicated person he sees, and he doesn’t want to arrest everyone who is drunk in public because he “would be banging his head against the walls.”

“If I make two or three intoxication arrests on a weekend, that speaks for itself. I get the ones that stand out,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to arrest every publicly intoxicated person I come across because I would be buried in paperwork.”

Ballantine agreed with Snider’s assertion that officers are not looking to arrest every intoxicated individual they spot.

“If you’ve had too much to drink, you’re not driving and you’re propelling yourself down the street, the cops are not going to bother you,” Ballantine said. “If you’re falling down drunk, urinating on buildings, screaming, wrestling or fighting, something has drawn the officer to you. Then they have no choice; they have to make the arrest.”

Ballantine added if the officer does not make an arrest, and an individual hurts either himself or herself or someone else, then the officer is held responsible for not doing his duty.

“There have been a number of court cases where the officers were successfully sued because they didn’t take someone into their safety,” he said. “Once you draw attention that you’re drunk, the officer starts losing the options given to him or her.”

Cpt. Gary Foster of the Story County Sheriff’s Office said he agrees that officers should pass up publicly intoxicated persons who are not being irresponsible.

“If you go to a football game, for instance, there are alcohol beverages consumed there, and we couldn’t possibly arrest everyone at that game that is intoxicated,” he said. “A vast majority that attend do so in a responsible manner and draw no attention to themselves, but in instances [when individuals do draw police attention], we do become involved.”

Sometimes that involvement becomes so heightened the city jail reaches its capacity, Ballantine said.

“It’s nearly full on the nights of a concert or a major football game, Homecoming and Veishea,” he said. “Most are drunks, but we never not arrest because the jail is full.”

Statistics corroborate officers’ assertions that they are making large numbers of public intoxication arrests. In 1998, Ames Police officers arrested 419 people for public intoxication compared to 393 in 1997 and 479 in 1996, according to the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI.

If a person arrested for public intoxication is from Story County or a contiguous county, he or she is held in the city or county jail for four hours. Those arrested whose residence is outside of that area are held until the following morning, when they meet with a judge to discuss punishment.

Often those arrested for public intoxication do not take the charge seriously since it is classified as a simple misdemeanor and only punished by a small fine and possibly a short stay in jail.

“I guess as far as crime goes, it’s a petty crime, a simple misdemeanor,” Snider said. “In the eyes of some people, they think it’s no big deal, but in a lot of people it should be a warning sign that they have a substance-abuse problem.”

Substance abuse, namely alcohol abuse, is something law enforcement officials would like to combat, but most say they don’t know how.

“If I could answer that question, I would be a millionaire,” Ballantine said. “When I went to school, we never went out with the intent to get wasted, and we very seldom did. Nowadays it’s not, ‘We’re going out dancing and socializing,’ but, ‘We’re getting wasted, and if we socialize on the way, that’s part of it.'”

Ballantine said he would like to change that type of behavior, but he doesn’t think it’s going to occur because the alcohol problem in Ames is not an isolated incident — it’s a problem in every university town.

“I would say cut the alcohol off,” Kessel said. “There are many locations people can buy and ingest alcohol. When there are that many places and the population is as great as ours, you are going to see [abuse]. Alcohol is still the most widely abused drug we see in America.”

Foster added that he, too, would like to see the number of intoxication arrests decrease. He feels this could possibly occur through increased education.

“I think there is too much of an emphasis placed on alcohol by young people,” he said. “I don’t suspect [it will decrease] until people realize that they can have as much fun without chemical substances.”

But that might be a difficult sell to the young male who attempted to escape his arrest for public intoxication. His apprehension added yet another entry in the Ames Police Department’s arrest book.

“I got him. I got him down here. East end of Hy-Vee. No problem. Code 4,” Jeff Brinkley reports through his shoulder to the dispatcher.

“We’re done playing this game. Now you’re going down for Class C felony escape,” he says to the young man.

“I’ll go with you, for real,” the male says, lying stomach-down in a grass field behind the West Ames Hy-Vee. This time the handcuffs are double clicked, clenching his wrists tighter.

“Yeah, I know you’re going with me, for real,” Brinkley replies.

“No, for real, for real!”

“Yep, I know you’re going, for real,” Brinkley says again.

“For real, dawg!”

“There ain’t’ no walking away this time,” Brinkley says. “Yep, I gotcha. You’re not going anywhere this time.”