A group of women in short, bright-colored sundresses passes by, one of them stumbling and grabbing onto her girlfriends for support.
"It's 11 o'clock, and they're already tanked," Ecker said. "They can't walk, and they have flats on. And they are not going home. ... It's going to be a long night."
Meanwhile, Ecker's officers are patrolling the nearby neighborhoods. With the help of county police, they break up a yard party at a house not far from U.S. 1, confiscating six kegs, citing the hosts for providing alcohol to minors and pushing the dozens of attendees back into the neighborhood.
Ecker returns to U.S. 1, watches the crowd slowly build and listens to the conversations around him. Two women walk by Ecker, who is dressed in his full uniform, talking about how fun the bar district is.
"We need to get fake IDs, though," one says to the other as they walked past Ecker.
"I am standing right here!" he shouts at them.
When a call goes in to 911, Prince George's County officers respond. But they are backed up by the university police, whose jurisdiction extends beyond campus to the surrounding neighborhoods.
At 1:30 a.m., Ecker and other officers gather at the south end of the bar strip and watch the sidewalks swell to capacity as the bars prepare to close.
The crowd spills into the street. A county police cruiser slowly drives along the curb, and the officer yells that everyone needs to get back on the sidewalk.
Slowly, the huge crowd thins out as students stumble toward dorms, apartments and houses.
Just after 2 a.m., most of the bars' doors are locked. U.S. 1 is nearly quiet. Lights in houses turn off one by one.
"They're young and naive, a bit, so they do listen," Ecker said. "They do eventually go home."
