Three cheers go out to the State College Police Department, which continued to impress me this past weekend. On Friday night I walked into the Unimart on Locust Lane to find several intoxicated teenagers threatening the cashier for seemingly no reason other than that he was from another country.

They refused to leave the store despite the cashier's insistence, and one of the troublemakers shouted obscenities and inane ethnic slurs.

I asked the cashier, who was by himself in the store, if he needed any help, at which point he hastily gave me $1.50 in quarters and told me to call the police as soon as possible.

He was clearly frightened, and believed the group of teenagers was capable of taking things to the next level.

I promptly dialed 911 from the payphone outside the store, and the operator said the police would be at the scene immediately.

In reality, it took the police nearly 20 minutes to get to the Unimart, and even then, it was by accident.

I had been waiting outside the store to see if the situation inside would escalate, and noticing a police cruiser parked near Acme Pizza, I walked to the car and knocked on the officer's window to remind him that his presence might be more useful elsewhere.

By the time the officer made it inside the Unimart, the drunken teenagers had just left the store, after harassing the cashier for what seemed like ages.

While there could have been a speedier reaction on Friday night, the police were on top of their game on Sunday. A friend of mine went to Zeno's that night to have some beers and listen to music, but the bouncer wouldn't let him in because he believed his New Jersey driver's license was fake.

He called the police, who turned up swiftly to deal with my friend. They frisked him from head to toe and ordered him to sit in the back of the police car while they scanned his license, which, not surprisingly, eventually proved that he was in fact 21 years old.