State College Police Cpl. Bill Muse looks relaxed, but he's not. Quickly shifting his sport utility vehicle into gear, he swerved out of his parking space on East College Avenue and accelerated at a slammed-into-your-seat pace down the halogen-lit street.
"That car crossed the double-yellow line twice," he explained.
A half-mile later on North Atherton Street, he switched on the flashers.
"I never pull over on College Avenue," he said. "All the rubberneckers stop by and want to see what the show is."
Such split-second decisions, bewildering to the casual observer, come naturally to the 13-year veteran of the State College Police Department. An acknowledged "top gun" of the force, Muse has consistently led the state in DUI arrests -- and that comes in handy during weekends like this past one when highly anticipated football games attract thousands to State College.
And Friday, a combination of rainy weather, heavy traffic and costumed pre-Ohio State revelry put the best of his skills to the test.
The green Subaru Legacy driving clumsily on East College Avenue turned out to be a false alarm -- the driver, a shaky college-aged man in square-framed glasses and plaid shoes, was just tired and had been talking on his cell phone. Muse let him go with a warning to be more careful on the road.
Distracted drivers can be just as bad as drunk drivers, he said -- and State College has enough of those.
Three hours later, Muse got his man. Already following a car down East College Avenue, something caught his eye -- a swerving blue Honda with four costumed passengers squeezed into the back seats. The driver, a 22-year-old visitor from Havertown, blew a .088 blood-alcohol content in his preliminary Breathalyzer test.
Muse went over the man's legal options during the drive to the Penn State Police station for fingerprinting and processing.
"This is routine for me. This is probably scary as hell for you," he told him.
The evening also saw its fair share of non-vehicular crime as costumed students crammed sidewalks and bars, spilling out of apartments and cars into the waiting streets.
Almost as soon as he pulled out of the police station's parking lot to start his night, Muse's headlights spotlighted a man urinating against a tree.
"You ask them how much they had to drink -- the proverbial two beers," he said. This man, dressed in a brown button-down and worn jeans, admitted to three.
Too often, perpetrators of a crime have left the scene by the time police arrive, Muse said. Case in point: Around midnight, the corporal responded to a harassment call on Pugh Street to find state troopers helping a man dressed as a sumo wrestler to his feet. Friends of the victim, who was now bewilderedly wrapped in the folds of his deflated costume, told police he had been tackled by a man in a blond mullet wig who subsequently ran away down the street.
As Muse puts it, you can't legislate good decision-making.
That wasn't the only fight he would see that night. At about 2:15 a.m., Muse pulled up to an assault at the Brewery, 233 E. Beaver Ave. The victim, holding a bloodied rag to his mouth, told police another man had bitten him on the lip.
"If that's true, I want simple," Muse told the officer on scene, referring to a simple assault charge.
Immediately afterward, the police radio squawked that officers were on scene at a fight at Phi Gamma Delta, 319 N. Burrowes St. After parking on the street, Muse found a man lying in the fraternity's parking lot, drunkenly blubbering to the officers ringed around him. He had thrown a two-by-four through the window of a parked car with an Ohio license plate.
"This isn't a funny situation," the man said, blearily emphatic. A friend in a bunny suit comforted him.
"Most times, you just have to laugh at some of the stuff you see," Muse said. "As long as nobody's hurt."
