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Story time. I’ll make this short.

Please only respond if you have legal experience or lots of drinking experience, no soccer moms.

This is at a public University in Illinois.

We throw a lot of parties. We throw about 1 a week, usually 5 kegs and jungle juice, and have never had a problem. All last year we had no cops. We keep things very quiet, I do not want to get into details, but we’re are in a secluded part of campus and have only 1 neighbor. Second week of the school year, we’re throwing a 6 kegger and the cops show up at 1am basically just as the party is ending. I comply with everything they say and they give out about 70 drinking tickets at $275 per ticket. I did not get any fines at all because ‘i was so compliant’, which is weird because I organized the party and supplied several hundred dollars worth of alcohol to underage kids. I swear its almost like they want me to throw another one.

The setup of our house and size will not account for all our guests. Its a one story ranch home with a basement and we have had up to 500 (10 kegger homecoming) people at a time, usually we only have about 300. As a result, many guests prefer to spend time outside on our driveway opposed to our crowded house. The driveway is the most secluded exterior portion of our rental property, as its next to a forest and super dark.

Heres my question. The cops come to our house for whatever reason, tipped off, randomly decide to bust us(the cops have always known about us, we’re one of the biggest party houses on campus). Because there are so many people outside drinking, do they have probable cause to come into my house or do I need to give them permission?

I think they will only have probable cause if they find someone underage drinking on my property who says he got it from me. Do the cops still need permission to enter my house? Do they need a search warrant?

Id like to protect these kids even if it means me getting fined about $1000.

This is our current ‘to do if cops come’:

Less kids could have received tickets, but a security mechanism we had established didn’t quite work out. Normally theres a lookout for cops, but for whatever reason he was not at his post. So we didn’t find out about the cops in time and were only able to get about 200 people out before they had the place locked down, theres 3 exits and at least 290 of 300 should be able to out run the cops if everything worked as planned. Normally the lookout runs around the house screaming "cops run" but it didn’t happen until too late. All my roommates leave with whatever money we’ve made and I stay there and assist the police as a courteous sober house monitor. Is it better to keep everyone inside the house? Remember, theres a ton of kids drinking outside. We try to keep kids off of the street which is public property, cops can stop you anytime there and ask for an ID which has never happened to my knowledge near my residence.

Thanks for your advice.

My house was the same way in college. Skip a week every now and then, or occasionally throw "21ers only" parties. That way you don’t become a reliable source of income for bored college police.

Also, a higher cup fee will keep the numbers down to an amount that actually fits in the house. Or, on the other side, allow you to rent out a bigger space- any barns or warehouses in town?

What really sucks, is about an hour after they busted your party, those same cops went back to one of their own houses, and got even drunker and rowdier than you. I used to party with those guys too.

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