While Harvard undergraduates trek over to the athletics facilities in Allston every day, their housing has been confined to the Cambridge side of the Charles River.

Graduate students, meanwhile, have lived in Allston for years—in the HBS dorms, at the Soldiers Field housing complex, and now at the new building at One Western Ave.—without any notable incidents.

But with BU’s campus in the heart of South Allston and BC’s campus bordering nearby Brighton, the area has an especially high concentration of college students—and it is the undergraduates at these two colleges that have been the most frequent target of residents’ complaints.

About six years ago the Boston Police Department (BPD) instituted a new zero-tolerance policy in order to quell unruly behavior at BU’s and BC’s off-campus housing.

Police officers talk to all incoming freshmen at the schools about respecting the communities they live in, and they have no qualms about arresting students when they misbehave.

BPD Captain William B. Evans says that fewer residents have complained about disruptive student neighbors since police implemented a stricter approach to house parties.

“We don’t hear from the house [again] if we lead four [students] out of there,” says Evans, who is responsible for District 14, which includes Allston and Brighton. “Unfortunately that seems to be the only thing students seem to understand.”

In November, Evans and North Allston residents had their first highly-publicized confrontation with Harvard undergraduates when students descended en masse on Ohiri Field for the Harvard-Yale tailgate.

The students did not make a good impression.

Michael Hanlon ’69, whose family has lived in Allston since 1955, estimates that on his way to the Harvard-Yale game he saw 3,000 students drinking outside the stadium. When he left, nearly three hours later, Hanlon says that the students were still there.

Ninety-seven IDs were confiscated, 29 students were ejected from the tailgate for underage drinking, and two students were arrested.

“Harvard-Yale was out of control,” Evans says. “That’s the stuff we don’t want to see in the neighborhood.”

The totals included students from Yale as well as Harvard, and Evans says that the behavior was confined to a limited area. But he adds that he is concerned about what would happen if Harvard undergraduates lived in his district.

Hanlon, who is also a member of the Harvard Allston Campus Task Force, agrees that residents’ interactions with college students have not left them enthusiastic about the prospect of more undergraduates in the area.

“Look at what those BC students and BU students are doing in the lower part of Allston,” says Hanlon. “I don’t think Harvard undergraduates have that reputation, although they are as human as those people are.”