Curbing underage drinking
Young students at UCF and elsewhere are providing a demand for a new generation of fake IDs, experts say
Sifting through a pile of confiscated fake IDs, University of Central Florida police Sgt. James Mangan remembered the time he pulled over a teen driving home from a bar.
When Mangan asked to see his drivers license, the teen tried to hide a fraudulent ID while looking for his real one.
Asked why he had a fake one, the student said, “People told me [when] you go to college, have a fake ID.”
Experts say that attitude — along with easy availability of fake IDs in the Internet Age — contributes to the problem of underage drinking at the University of Central Florida, and at other colleges across the country.
How many UCF students have fake IDs is unknown. But officials at UCF and elsewhere have been battling underage drinking for years.
“Our goal is to change that mindset of underage drinking around UCF,” Mangan said.
From April to September, 107 people younger than 21 were charged with alcohol possession, mostly off campus but near UCF, according to data from a joint-enforcement effort by UCF police and the Orange County Sheriff ’s Office.
Most were charged in an area west of UCF near Alafaya Trail that is lined with bars and restaurants, many catering to college students.
UCF police teamed with the Sheriff’s Office in April for the joint-enforcement detail called Sector II Noise and Alcohol Patrol, or SNAP, because of the underage-drinking problem near campus.
Because the SNAP detail is new, there isn’t any comparative information to show trends of underage drinking around UCF, the nation’s second-largest university by enrollment with 61,000 students.
But an Orlando Sentinel analysis of statistics from the Orange County Sheriff ’s Office last year showed 209 underage drinkers were charged with DUI in the county in 2013 — a 48 percent increase from 2012.
Ninety-one of those were within 2 miles of UCF, which was more than double the number of arrests in 2012.
Reports have linked the rise of fake IDs on college campuses to the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in 1984, which effectively raised the minimum drinking age from 18 to 21 years old.
The demand for fake IDs skyrocketed when thousands of under-21 college students — many living away from home for the first time — could no longer drink legally. And to some, drinking in college is a rite of passage. That puts pressure on teens to purchase fake IDs, according to Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration spokesman Rich Lucey.
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“I’ve been in the prevention field for almost 25 years now, and fake IDs have been around for as long as I’ve been in the business, and even when I was in college,” Lucey said. “I don’t think we’re going to eliminate the existence of fake IDs, but it really comes down to a law-enforcement issue.” But the Internet has made enforcement more difficult. Long gone are the days when a guy in the neighborhood, armed with an X-ACTO knife and laminating machine, pieced together sometimes-convincing counterfeit licenses.
Today all you have to do is pick one of many websites, upload a picture and pay a fee — some are as low as $50 —to get a realistic ID complete with such security features as holograms and data-imprinted magnetic strips.
Chinese counterfeiters are a major supplier of fake IDs online, according to Keeping Identities Safe, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about the fake ID problem.
Four U.S. senators, concerned about national security, sent a letter to the Chinese ambassador in 2012, asking for the shutdown of IDChief, the largest counterfeiter at the time.
It closed days later but several others have surfaced since then, providing “thousands of fake documents,” the senators wrote.
UCF’s SNAP detail is one of several strategies the university is using to curb alcohol abuse and help students. Several awareness programs are offered to students, including the AlcoholEdu program, which must be completed before registering for classes.
A student vote in 2011 overwhelmingly supported a policy that encourages students to come forward and report emergencies related to alcohol consumption without getting punished.
And, under the SNAP detail, UCF police officers sheriff ’s deputies perform bar and parking-lot checks.
During these patrols, they make contact with anyone with a drink in hand who looks underage or anyone appearing intoxicated and underage.
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