Senior Project from Lauren Cioffi on Vimeo.

Leah Kaplan, 17, attends a lot of parties. Parties come with the territory of being a senior in high school. So far this year, she said, she has attended 35.

“Mostly every party I go to has alcohol,” Kaplan said while her mother sat across from her in the living room of their Commack home. “If there is a house party, there is going to be alcohol.” She caught a glimpse of her mother’s reaction, a —– smile, and released an embarrassed laugh.

More often than not, Kaplan said, the parents are in control of the premises, an act that, under Suffolk County’s three year-old social host law, is illegal.

The county’s social host liability law states that anyone over the age of 18 who knowingly allows a minor to consume alcohol on private property can be ticketed or arrested. The law was passed three months after Nassau County adopted its law in December 2007.

Since the law took effect, Nassau County has made 58 arrests. Suffolk County, whose law was drafted three months later, has made seven.

“I wouldn’t say the law is ineffective,” Leg. Ricardo Montano (D-Brentwood) who introduced the law in Suffolk County, said. “But if it’s not enforced by the localities, then it does become ineffective.”

In both counties, police can either make an arrest or issue a desk appearance ticket, both of which the offense is an unclassified misdemeanor that “provides for penalties up to $1,000.”

“It’s the same charge,” Lt. Michael Murphy of Suffolk County’s 6th Precinct Crime Section said. “We can issue a field appearance ticket. It’s a summons. It’s designed to allow the police officer to finish what he is doing and get back to another call.”

He added that issuing an arrest is reserved for cases in which the person committing the crime is either intoxicated or does not have proper identification.

“When people are arrested,” he said, “they didn’t fit the criteria.”

“The social host law is something that we started arresting people for right from the beginning,” Lt. Kevin Smith, detective lieutenant and commanding officer of Nassau County’s public information office, said. “It’s something that does take up a lot of officers time, but we do seem to think people do get the message.”

For Kaplan, who lives in Suffolk County, that message hasn’t changed the frequency of her party life. “From when I was a freshman to now, things are exactly the same,” Kaplan said. “The strict parents are still strict, and the parents that don’t care, the ones you really need to be appealing to, they aren’t really listening to this.”

According to a 2009 report from the Advisory Council on Underage Alcohol Consumption, in New York, 49 percent of high school seniors reported drinking alcohol within the past 30 days of the survey. In 2007, New York State residents spent $3.5 billion on medical care and other costs related to underage drinking, equating to $1,802 per minor.

The social host liability law is an attempt to deter these costs and decrease underage alcohol use. As of 2010, 29 communities and 13 counties statewide have adopted similar ordinances. According to the Alcohol Policy Information System (APIS), which updated its data Jan. 1, 2010, 19 states have adopted similar hosting laws. On Jan. 5, 2011, New York State joined that list.

To date, Suffolk County police have issued 20 summonses, in comparison to Nassau’s 61. In any locale, the success rate of enforcing behavioral change is a struggle, according to Pamela Mizzi, the director of the Prevention Resource Center in Suffolk County.

“The Suffolk County police are interpreting the law to the letter of the law saying that they must visualize themselves the ingestion of the beverage by an underage person,” Mizzi said.

“In other counties that have passed social host ordinances there is an understanding that if there is alcohol present, if it is a party atmosphere and there are underage kids there, there is an assumption that alcohol has been consumed,” Mizzi said.

“We can’t assume,” Murphy of Suffolk County’s 6th Precinct said. “We can’t say, ‘of course, they have to had known.’ A lot of times your gut will tell you they knew, and sometimes you can’t prove it. You can’t prove every case.”

In 2010, to help make a stronger defense for social host law arrests, Nassau County began using social media to detect underage drinking before it occurs.  By searching for viral party invites, or “Twitter parties,” through an anonymous computer, the Nassau County Police Department Intelligence Section, a division of the Asset Forfeiture Bureau, can track the occurrence of social host law violations.

“As this Twitter post would get retweeted over and over again, almost like a virus, different gangs and different people who normally would not congregate in the same area all come together at one party,” Thomas Calvert, a detective for the Intelligence Section of Nassau County said. In one weekend, two shootings and a homicide had occurred at parties as a result of viral tweets.

“We decided to start monitoring our social networking sites in order to try and prevent these kinds of parties from taking place.”

There is no such similar task force in Suffolk County. “We do the intelligence gathering at the precinct level,” Murphy said.  “Officers from my unit perform this task as one of the many tasks they perform during any given week.”

According to Calvert, without a task force designed to track and disseminate the Internet data, information loses its verification and credibility.

In the year the Intelligence Section has been tracking these parties, according to Calvert, it has disrupted at least 30 gatherings.

“We’ve been able to shut down parties before they have even happened,” Calvert said. “It provides us a window into things we normally wouldn’t see.”

According to Calvert, policing the Internet is only the beginning of the process. After disseminating the information to specific units based on its Intel lead, the police department will then assign patrol units to arrive on the scene.

From there, the first step, according to police, is to find who is in control of the premise. If that person is serving alcohol to minors, he or she is in violation of the social host law.

“If it is obvious that it (a party) is going on, if you are in the den while all this is going on and people are drinking, you have to take steps to stop it,” Smith of Nassau County police, said.

He added that if the person in control of the premise denies the obvious party then he or she “might have to prove it in a court of law.”