Spring Breakers Twerk, Beat Up Uber Driver, and Stampede in Miami Beach

Has Miami Beach been enjoying its annual spring-break revelry a little too hard? Or did someone just dump a vat of high-grade LSD into the local water supply?

The answer is unclear. Last week, people were twerking on car rooftops on highways and rubbing their butts on police vehicles.

Beach cops have worked hard to tamp down the increasingly batshit-crazy crowds that descend upon the island every March, but the insanity continued this past weekend. And there's video to prove it. In a mere 24 hours, crowds were caught on camera blocking traffic to twerk in the streets, running from what might have been a gun and/or a live snake, and, most depressing, beating the tar out of a local Uber driver who got a bit too close to some pedestrians.

Ernesto Rodriguez, a spokesperson for Miami Beach Police, tells New Times that Beach PD hasn't made any arrests in relation to these clips, but police captains stationed around Ocean Drive are actively looking into what went down during the stampede and beating.

All three clips were posted online by hotel owner Mitch Novick, who has long maintained that Ocean Drive's reputation as a den of iniquity is driving away wealthy, upscale tourists. (A great number of Novick's complaints tend to focus on black visitors scaring away elderly white people, but that's another story.)

First, the innocuous news: At 5 a.m. Saturday (just after most bars and clubs on the Beach shut down for the night), a woman walked into stopped traffic, grabbed the bumper of a random car, and began shaking her rear end like a pro. A drunk dude immediately sprinted up to her and began grinding on her. After what seemed to be some spirited grinding, the woman bolted, and a group of extremely drunk, basic-looking bros began grinding on one another while somehow holding back tons of self-hatred:

Things only went downhill from there. At 8:30 p.m., a security camera caught a gigantic stampede of people sprinting away from the beach as if Mothra had risen from the sea and began firing laser beams at revelers. (The audio in the clip below is allegedly fake, according to the source who passed it along to New Times.)

But Rodriguez, the police spokesperson, said via email that multiple stampedes occurred in South Beach this past Saturday. Rodriguez said that he wasn't sure which one this was but that a crowd sprinted away from a person holding a live snake, and, later on, a person allegedly whipped out a gun on Ocean Drive. Both incidents sound about right for Miami.

The crowds became more hostile as the night wore on. Two hours after the stampede, drunk folks had pretty much taken over Collins Avenue. Though streets packed with drunk tourists are par for the course during Miami Beach spring break, what happened next isn't: An Uber driver in a black Hyundai narrowly avoided clipping three men trying to cross the street. The driver stopped, and three dudes yanked him out of the vehicle and started wailing on him. The driver quickly crumpled to the ground, where he was repeatedly kicked and kneed like an outclassed MMA fighter.

MBPD says a security guard called police to report a fight at Eighth Street and Collins Avenue right when this video was shot. But Rodriguez said police closed the report without finding or arresting anyone.

"My guess is the parties dispersed before anyone arrived," Rodriguez said.

March ends in 11 days.