Miami Beach is largely helpless to stop Memorial Day partiers from coming to town for Urban Beach Weekend, which saw seven injured and one killed in police-related shootings this year, city Mayor Matti Herrera Bower said Tuesday afternoon. According to police, more than 400 were arrested.
"There is no organizer, no event. It's just there," she said, emphasizing that the city does not control or issue any permits for any of the long weekend's events. She also claimed heavy monitoring from the ACLU handicaps the city's ability to increase enforcement.
It's a different situation than the city's increased spring break enforcement, she said, because "they're not there saying 'you can't search that cooler'" at spring break.
Is the American Civil Liberties Union that influential over government decisions? "I guess so," she said.
Officials
added that more than 500 area police officers were working on South
Beach this weekend -- this, combined with staffing costs that included
paying those who collected 177 tons of trash in the area, cost the city
an estimated $1 million.
Bower said she
understood residents' concerns that the damage outweighed the benefits
of the weekend's festivities, which drew between 150,000 and 200,000
people but saw one man killed and seven injured in police shootings. In total, 431 people were arrested, up from 382 last year, according to Miami Beach Det. Juan Sanchez.
"We are also up in arms... We have put up with this for 10 years," Bower said, but "there's not many options."
She quickly discounted a suggestion put forth by Miami Beach commissioner Jerry Libbin
that a curfew be imposed next year, saying that "I don't know we want
to go down in history as a curfew city." She said administrators were
still brainstorming ways to make the event safer in the future and
mentioned possibly rolling back operating hours of area night clubs that
weekend.
The mayor gave no indication that the
city would take any official policy against the return of Urban Beach
Weekend -- because, she said, it was not an event.
"Four bad apples spoiled the bushel," she said. "This is not the only weekend [residents] don't like."
When
asked if the situation was analogous to Fort Lauderdale's issues with
college students on spring break in the 1980s, city spokeswoman Nannette
Rodriguez said that locking out spring break partying proved to be
economically damaging, and Bower chief of staff Rebecca Wakefield said,
"I don't think we want to be Fort Lauderdale for a lot of different
reasons."
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