Peoria City Council Barbara Van Auken and former Mayor Michael E OBrien

Yes. Bradley University Officers are police officers with same training and authority as officers from other types of police jurisdictions.  

More than 20 years ago I was a executive officer of a fraternity down the street from the Bradley Sigma Nu house. They had and still have an excellent local and national reputation. One of the reasons that they had a good rep was that they like our fraternity house tended to elect the most moderate drinkers and best GPA's to the exec board. The biggest drinkers did not want the responsibility of being on the executive officer rotation, where there were social events where one or more of us was designated as the non drinker who was going to be behind the bar or at the door until the party died down.  

These "self policing" policies were a compromise constructed by 18-21 year olds who were caught between national organizations and campus administration that wanted no drinking in the houses and our collegiate membership that joined in large part because they wanted a place to indulge themselves. And there were a number of us that wanted to overindulge ourselves. Even then, we were all well versed on what constituted "probable cause" that would have allowed police officers to enter the property. The most significant would be if an underage person left the house carrying open liquor and was then stopped, but noise was also a probable cause factor.  

Now, juxtapose this against the situation at Andrew Rand's that even. Like us, Barbara Van Auken is an elected representative, but she is not an executive. The executive is actually Jim Ardis. But she is a representative and she and the others in the neighborhoods are adults with a lot more knowledge, experience and discretion than a bunch of 18, 19, 21 year old guys................ And there is the rub. No matter how you slice this, the only reasonable conclusion is that the FRAT BOYS were MORE SOBER and MORE LAW ABIDING than the so called ADULT PILLARS OF THE COMMUNITY on that evening. On both sides, the behavior is understandable and unfortunately all too typical. But for goodness sakes, if you tend to drink too much, just don't run for public office. Public office will increase your stress, put you in situations that can be personally embarrassing, and people are going to use everything you say and do against you in some very cruel ways.  

I became a public spectacle at the age of 25. Often I wonder how much worse it might have been had I not quit drinking 3 years earlier after my 22nd birthday. I don't doubt that the likelihood that I would have ended up in prison like Frank Picl, or dead by suicide as have a number of Peoria Attorneys. Peoria has a long history of attorneys on the City Council and to put Barbara Van Auken incident in perspective, at least she has never drank during council meetings, passed out and fallen out of her chair and underneath her desk as did Mayor Michael E O'Brien. To be fair, O'Brien later attained status as a "honors graduate" of Hazelden, and was appointed as an Associate Judge in Peoria County.

.I would suggest that Barbara spend less time with "Randy Andy" and perhaps go and have a long chat with Judge O'Brien......if he is still alive. I suspect that the ornery old bastard is.