Madison police Lt. Joe Balles has two Badgers' home games circled in red on his calendar.

And it's not because he's a big college football fan. In fact, he could do with fewer fans in town on Oct. 4, when the Badgers play Ohio State and on Oct. 11, when their foe will be Penn State.

Balles supervises patrol officers in the city's Central District, so it's his job to keep the peace Downtown, which doesn't get easier when 80,000 people descend on Camp Randall.

Since last spring, one of the Police Department's most prized tools for controlling alcohol-related crime and disorder in the Central District has been the Downtown Safety Initiative, a special enforcement effort involving the use of police overtime in targeted areas on select Friday and Saturday nights.

The program was developed in response to an increase in violent street crime Downtown, including a disturbing pattern of weekend bar-time muggings of male college students in the spring of 2006.

But future funding for the initiative is uncertain, and the record is mixed as to whether it has reduced violent crime — even as its effect on alcohol-related offenses such as public drunkenness and carrying open intoxicants is well-established. In 2007, officers issued more than 700 city ordinance violations as part of the initiative.

Police see the two categories of crime as related.

"Our whole philosophy here is really that by focusing on (public order) types of crimes — things like open intoxicants, urinating in public, disorderly conduct — we will stop other crimes, such as robberies, aggravated assaults and simple assaults," Balles said.

Tight finances

But support for the initiative as it is currently funded is waning.

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and the City Council allocated $100,000 in both 2007 and 2008 for the effort, which also stresses expanded community policing in Downtown neighborhoods and increased compliance by bars with alcohol-related rules.

Cieslewicz said he is pleased with the program — "It's been good for the overall sense of safety Downtown," he said — and he planned to fund it in next year's budget, despite tight finances that could force cuts throughout city government.

"Everything is on the table in terms of potential cuts," Cieslewicz said. "But I would be very reluctant to eliminate or substantially cut the program when overall it's been successful and popular."

After 2009, though, all bets may be off.

Cieslewicz said the program was never intended to be permanently paid for out of the city's general fund, and some council members outside the Downtown already resent the extra taxpayer money for it.

Future budgets, he said, should rely on different funding sources for the program, such as the annual fees paid by State Street-area businesses into the region's Business Improvement District. Those fees now go toward things such as Downtown maps and Christmas decorations.

Business improvement districts in other cities have helped pay for police protection, said Cieslewicz, who added that's only fair: Businesses benefit from a safer Downtown, and it is their presence that draws people in, requiring the extra police resources.

The mayor also wants to see a formal review of the program's effectiveness. Cieslewicz said he knew it was "tremendously popular" with business groups such as Downtown Madison Inc. and the Police Department.

But he said he wanted to see more than just "anecdotal evidence" that it was working.

"We need to develop some ways of setting goals for the program to evaluate whether it's been successful," he said.

'Keeping a lid on things'

Police leaders are convinced the program is working, citing the many ordinance violations and some criminal offenses flagged by officers during last year's patrols in the lower State Street/University Avenue area and in student neighborhoods.

Without such proactive enforcement, Balles said, many of those alcohol-related tickets would not have been issued and more serious crimes could have resulted, police maintain.

"We're doing a pretty good job of keeping a lid on things," Balles said.

Bar owner Dick Lyshek said most Downtown businesses would approve of any effort that reduces "true criminal activity," such as muggers or indigents stealing from cars.

But he said it was counter-productive to heavily enforce lesser offenses, such as "people being a little loud," carrying open intoxicants or underage drinking, all of which he classified more as "nuisances" that don't merit police "harassment."

"If you're trying to find every tipsy 20-year-old who may have had a beer, what you've done is created a situation where students who could be potential victims of crimes or witnesses hate the police," said Lyshek, who owns Ram Head Rathskeller at 303 N. Henry St.

Crime statistics

The safety initiative's record at reducing serious crimes is a mixed bag.

In the immediate State Street area, robberies were down by more than half last year, with 34 in 2006, before the initiative began, compared to 14 in 2007.

Simple assaults in and around State Street also were down from 137 in 2006 to 117 last year, records show.

But aggravated assaults went up during that period from 47 to 53, police said.

And that pattern has continued into this year for the Central District as a whole, a much bigger area which saw 58 aggravated assaults in the first six months of 2008 compared to 44 in the same period of 2007.

Balles said he believes most of this year's aggravated assaults are happening not in the State Street area, where the safety teams are most active, but in areas west of Lake Street, near Camp Randall, and in the Bassett Street neighborhood — where UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann was killed in April.

Not just students

In any case, the pattern of serious crime increasing isn't consistent. Robbery and simple assaults in the district either stayed the same or decreased moderately over the first six months of the year compared to the same period last year.

The argument that the initiative helps reduce serious crime also is bolstered by the number of serious arrests last year on nights the patrol was out, including 57 people jailed on misdemeanor or felony offenses.

Nor does the program only target UW-Madison students, Balles said. In fact, he said, fewer than half of the people officers arrested or issued citations to in 2007 as part of the program were affiliated with UW-Madison.

The rest were young people from other colleges around the state, plus plenty of non-students and older adults.

"You've got people coming in (to the State Street area) from all over," Balles said. "The sandbox that comprises the Downtown entertainment district is a very diverse sandbox, of which the UW-Madison students are just one factor."