Michael Flusche holds a party every year during Labor Day weekend to meet the students living near him. They hang out for a few hours and sometimes befriend Flusche for years to come. But when the day turns into night, the former Syracuse University professor regularly has to ask his neighbors to turn their music down.

“Sometimes they just do not understand how loud they are,” he said.

SU’s Department of Public Safety has referred 124 students for noise and open container violations during the 2009-10 academic year, and DPS expects that number to continue rising. The number is part of a four-year spike in off-campus DPS referrals as permanent residents and students have tried to coexist in the East neighborhood, which roughly covers the area between Clarendon Street and Colvin Avenue.

DPS referred 175 students to the Office of Judicial Affairs in the 2008-09 school year, according to statistics from the Office of Government and Community Relations. That is up from 85 referrals during the previous academic year and 62 the year before that. DPS made all the referrals off campus, but SU officials estimated the students referred were split halfway between on- and off-campus residents.

DPS Captain John Sardino said he expects this year’s referral total to be right around that of last year’s. He attributed the spike in recent years to neighbors calling more about student noise and more partying in warm weather.

“One busy weekend could result in 10 or 12 students being referred to Judicial Affairs,” he said.

Four years ago, DPS added five officers to patrol the East neighborhood on weekends and three officers to patrol Sunday through Thursday. A DPS official estimated the additional patrols had lowered crime by 75-80 percent in the East neighborhood.

Several weeks ago, Harry Lewis woke up at 2 a.m. in his Lancaster Avenue home to the sound of firecrackers.

“I heard a sound, so I looked out the window,” Lewis said. “And I saw another person light a cracker.”

Lewis, 83, reported the incident several days later instead of calling police that morning. He said he sometimes gives students a little leeway since many of them live in the area.

“I should have called right away, but I waited until Monday and called Off-Campus Student Services,” Lewis said. “They said they would contact DPS, who would then go talk to the people in the house.”

Lewis is the treasurer of the South East University Neighborhood Association, which advocates bringing back permanent residents to the neighborhood around SU.

“We’re working like mad to keep it from turning into a student ghetto,” Lewis said. “That is our primary goal.”

Most students in the East neighborhood do not interact much with neighbors since they have to deal with the pressures of school and growing up, Lewis said.

“Everybody’s in their own world,” he said. “You just have so much on your mind, the last thing you want to know is who your neighbors are.”

Abhishek Tummala, a graduate student, has lived three houses away from Lewis for almost two years. But he said the only neighbors he and his roommates know are the ones living above them.

“Honestly, we never got the chance to talk anyways,” Tummala, 23, said about his neighbors, attributing the lack of communication to all the schoolwork that every student was doing.

Tummala said he has never talked to permanent residents living around him about their feelings on parties, noise or safety issues.

“We can only tell from our point of view (how they feel),” Tummala said.

Students who violate local ordinances, such as noise, littering or open containers, are sometimes required to take a workshop called the Project for Community Engagement. During the workshop, the Office of Judicial Affairs teaches local laws and neighbor relations to the students, said Darya Rotblat, director of the Office of Off-Campus and Commuter Services.

Last spring, 105 students took the workshop, and 78 took it in fall 2009. Half the students who went through it said they knew their neighbors, Rotblat said in an e-mail. But Rotblat said some permanent residents didn’t want to talk to students and would only speak with them briefly through a screen door.

“They feel that all students are the same, and if they had a negative experience in the past, they believe it will only continue,” Rotblat said.

When DPS or the Office of Government and Community Relations receive complaints from permanent residents about nearby students, staff visits the students’ homes and encourages them to let the neighbors know if they’re having a party, Rotblat said.

The relationships students have with permanent residents may mean the difference between police writing tickets or neighbors being lenient, said DPS Cpl. Jimmy Thompson.

“If you’re a good neighbor and maybe you turn (music) up a little too loud, the neighbors might let it slide,” Thompson said.

Thompson started working with the Office of Off-Campus and Commuter Services four years ago to encourage communication between students and permanent residents.

He goes door to door on Euclid Avenue the first week of school and passes out fliers about safety precautions. He and SU officials also have tables on the corners of Euclid Avenue in good weather to encourage students to meet their neighbors.

But only about half the students make an effort to interact with their neighbors, Thompson said. Some students raked yards and picked up garbage for permanent resident neighbors, he said. But other students didn’t seem to care about establishing relations because they were only in the neighborhood for a few years.

The busy lives of students prevent Flusche, the former SU professor on Lancaster Avenue, from seeing most of his neighbors outside of his Labor Day party. But he said students are usually respectful to his requests to quiet down. He has talked to students in the twilight hours of the morning and also as early as 8 to 9 p.m. if noise or crowd size became too great, he said.

“It’s not at all uncommon for parties to get out of hand,” he said.

Flusche said shouting on the streets also sometimes gets annoying, but there isn’t much he can do about it. Even with the noise, however, he said it’s nice to interact with students and have a lot of life in the neighborhood.

“We all have to work to make cities work,” Flusche said. “They don’t just happen.”

Published on March 31, 2010 at 12:00 pm