Captain Confronts Drinking

He wakes at 5 a.m. and 15 minutes later he is out the door, running eight miles in South Boston. Once back at his brownstone, he eats a plain bagel—no cream cheese—and rushes his three kids off to school. By 7:30 a.m., Captain William B. Evans is at his desk.

As the head of District 14 within the Boston Police Department (BPD), he oversees 75,000 inhabitants in Allston and Brighton, an area that includes Harvard Business School and the Stadium. His district, containing Boston College and Boston University, is the most densely populated in the city, and his toughest task has been smoothing over town-gown relations.

It’s a big job, but that’s not why Evans is known on this side of the Charles. Here, he’s the bad guy: the man behind the push for stricter alcohol policies at the Harvard-Yale tailgate. Last month, he became a barrier between Snoop Dogg and Harvard, refusing to sign the event license unless more officers were hired—a cost that the Undergraduate Council (UC) couldn’t cover.

Harvard is number three on his list of campuses. First come Boston University (BU) and Boston College (BC), where he sends some of his 125 officers to check IDs at tailgates and goes himself each fall to warn freshmen of the dangers of drinking.

Evans is also largely in charge of Operation Student Shield, a Boston initiative launched in January to cut out loud parties and public drinking—activities that can make town-gown relations tenuous.

He says both colleges have plans to expand their campuses into the surrounding neighborhoods, making his job as liaison between the City of Boston and the colleges even tougher.

But on a recent Monday afternoon, he had to give a superior a tour of the District 14 building, and then rush out to a Red Sox game to oversee crowd control. By the time he returns to his brownstone and his wife and kids, it might be near midnight.

“I’m one of those guys who has to keep going,” he says, taking a sip of the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee which, along with another plain bagel, completes his lunch.

HARD-KNOCK LIFE

Evans, 46, was the youngest in a family of six boys. His mother died when he was one, and eight years later, the brother he was closest to was struck by a car and died.

“I had a lot of tragedy,” he says. “I sort of had a quick, rude awakening.”

Then, when he was 13, his father passed away, leaving Evans to be raised by his four older brothers. In a cramped three-decker in South Boston, Evans shared a bed with two other brothers.

It wasn’t easy growing up in the South Boston, where he learned to deal with tough streets and tougher people. Still, he worked his way up to Suffolk University on Beacon Hill for his bachelor’s degree and then into the police force.

Evans follows family tradition. Two of his brothers are firefighters, and one was Boston Police Commissioner before he retired.

Once Evans graduated from the academy and joined the force 25 years ago, he rose through the ranks quickly with intense studying. For six months before each promotion, he would pore over books day and night, neglecting his family to prepare for the exam. The exam score alone determines who gets the spot.

“You literally have to put your life on hold,” he says.

From patrolman, he stepped up to sergeant; then, lieutenant; finally, captain. Now, Evans has reached the limit of the books, he says.

“Anything higher than that is like a political appointment.” And he misses the small tasks that he’s had to cut back on because of his high post.

Being the hero, Evans says, gives him “a rush.” So, sometimes, he just drives out to patrol.

LETTING GO OF THE TAILGATE

Back at District 14 headquarters on 301 Washington St., the door is wide open, letting in sunlight and street noise. An officer behind the front desk urges visitors to sit on a well-worn bench before turning back to her colleagues to discuss an upcoming Red Sox game and a possible trip to Six Flags.

In an office full of medals and marathon paraphernalia sits a small blond man with an angular face and ears that stick out. When he answers his desk phone, he says “Boston Police,” not “Captain Evans.”

While November seems long ago to most students, Evans is still fixated on the Harvard-Yale Tailgate, when Harvard came under his radar for one of the first times.

He had been dealing with students from other colleges for more than a decade, but the Game’s tailgate shocked him. Evans had thought 4,000 would attend; it turned out to be 10,000. He says he and his officers saw public urination, underage drinking, and drinking games, and he noticed that students passed by the free beer in favor of the hard liquor.

That day, BPD ejected 29 students for underage drinking, and, along with the Harvard University Police Department, it confiscated 97 IDs and performed two arrests.

“In the area of drinking, that was the worst we’d seen,” he says. “It was just students after students being taken in ambulances off the field.”

In addition, the students seemed to be provoking the town-gown conflict that he had been trying to avoid for nearly a decade in the residential areas near BU and BC.

“Whenever students move in, you see residents move out. That’s what I’m trying to stop,” he says.

WINNING BLAME

Every year, Evans goes to the freshman orientations at BU and BC, where he talks up the merits of partying legally—that is, sans underage drinking.

At BC, his officers check IDs at tailgates and confiscate them. Over the past ten years, he says students have learned to adapt the tailgates and make them, for the most part, alcohol-free.

But he reinforced his party-pooper reputation in talks with the College just before Springfest. When the UC dangled the possibility of a Snoop Dogg performance before students, Evans balked.

“Obviously, his lyrics are very offensive to certain groups,” he says. “I was afraid that would attract the wrong element,” he says, adding that potentially violent gangs from Cambridge and nearby areas might have flocked there to be near the rap star.

So Evans stipulated that the College hire more police before he would approve the concert.

“If I sign off the license, I don’t want three people dead and people looking at me like, ‘Why did you sign the license?’” he says.

Evans has been burned before. He recites a well-worn line: “We lost the boy after the Patriots [Superbowl victory], we lost the girl after the Red Sox.”

REACHING OUT

Now, even though he’s cracking down on the tailgates and parties they long for, he wants students at Harvard to like him—but it’s not easy.

“We’re the bad guys all the time,” he says, and he just wants “the chance to let people know that I’m not a bastard.”

He’s trying, and UC President Matthew J. Glazer ’06—who wants to maintain good relations with Evans for future UC business—calls him “approachable” and “respectful of students.”

Despite his desire to be liked, Evans plans to start policing other Harvard games and tailgates starting this fall.

He says collective student resentment about the strict tailgate has lasted too long. Still, he wants to limit the tailgate to just two hours before and after the Game the next time the Elis are in town.

“I’m not picking on Harvard,” he says. “I’m not an anti-student party person.”

He says he understands students. “I did all that. I went through those stages,” Evans says.

In his office, he displays a pile of medals from marathons. Across from his desk is a pile of stuffed animals, many of them discarded by his 14-year-old daughter. If he hears a visiting child crying in the building, Evans rushes out with a neon green bunny rabbit or teddy bear dressed as a police officer. They’re piled up on a chair across from his desk, a sharp contrast to his metal prizes.

“I like the bears here,” he says. “It gives a little softer touch.”

But Evans loves his tokens of honor. His latest is a framed certificate from the FBI National Academy in Virginia, where he spent ten weeks training with 250 other police leaders from across the country who were hand-picked for the honor. They did push-ups and ran dozens of miles—Evans brags that he did the best—and learned everything from leadership skills to media savvy.

Now that he’s back in Boston, he returns to his regular routine. On some nights, he returns to his Victorian brownstone at 11:30 p.m., more than 18 hours after he first jumped out of bed. He’ll open the cookie jar that his wife, Therese, keeps full. But other than chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin, he has few indulgences: a beer or two on the weekend, maybe.

—Staff writer April H.N. Yee can be reached at aprilyee@fas.harvard.edu.