Stateline party attracts a lot of cops

Western Nevada's biggest New Year's Eve party is at Stateline, and many of the area's law enforcement officers will be in attendance.

Three hundred law enforcement officers from seven agencies will be on foot and horse patrol to make sure the street party is as safe as possible.

"Last year was Y2K," said South Lake Tahoe Police Commander Rich McGuffin. "We're not expecting the crowd to be quite as big as last year. We've cut back our numbers quite a bit this year."

Police expect between 40,000 to 50,000-people at Stateline this New Year's. To accommodate the crowd, U.S. Highway 50 will be closed from Park Avenue to Lake Parkway from 9 p.m. to sometime after 1 a.m.

"We set a mood. We let them party a couple hours and ask them to leave and they do," said Douglas County Sheriff's Sgt. Lance Modispacher, a man who has worked in Stateline at New Year's for more than 20 years.

"When we first started having an influx of people, 1,000 or 2,000, we weren't about to let" things get out of hand. "We got in quite a confrontation. Pretty soon it was the cops against the revelers.

"Rather than threaten them, we said, 'OK, we want you to come to Lake Tahoe but when we ask you to leave we need you to leave.'"

Last year law enforcement agencies made more than 80 arrests at Stateline. Most were for disorderly conduct, Modispacher said.

"You can't ticket everybody," he said. "It's certainly a violation if you bring in bottles or cans. Those containers later become missiles. You get a bottle that holds half-a-gallon of champagne and what some of these evil-minded individuals do is sling it into the crowd ... If you want to throw an empty plastic cup that's your business."

To keep illegal activity to a minimum there will be 16 squads of officers, each with at least five police, squeezing their way through the crowd looking for troublemakers.

And after last year's Tarzan exhibition, officers also plan to keep an eye on utility poles in the Stateline area. "It's dangerous for people to climb poles," McGuffin said. "A young man was electrocuted in Las Vegas last New Year's climbing a pole."

Extra security will also be provided by businesses in the area like Heavenly. John Wagnon, vice president of marketing at the ski resort, said windows of the Discovery Gallery, Heavenly's store at Stateline and Highway 50, will be boarded up and extra security will be in place around the new gondola.

Harrah's Lake Tahoe is also expected to have more security on staff. "On New Year's we'll put all of our 50 officers on 12-hour-shifts and bring in 25 officers from an outside security agency," said Robert Kortan, head of security for the casino. "Of course, we have cameras up but most people are very nice. I think last year we only had one arrest."