Audio By Carbonatix
SoBe resident and Peruvian native Pablo Mejia has a plan for this
weekend: Stay home and lock the doors. “It’s a black day holiday, as
far as I’m concerned,” he says. “They steal; they destroy tables. It’s
dangerous.”
Mejia tells this to Riptide while hanging out in Flamingo Park on a
recent day. He doesn’t consider himself a racist — who does?
— but his comments underline the racial tension that’s likely to
grip the Beach this weekend, when thousands of African-American
vacationers are expected to descend upon the area for dozens of events
at clubs and hotels during what has become known as Urban Beach Week.
(For a list of events, click here.)
Since 2001, when Miami Beach Police donned riot gear and used pepper
spray on a crowd of partygoers on Washington Avenue, Memorial Day
weekend has been a focal point for conflict. In 2006, there were more
than 1,000 arrests — even against popular NFL and NBA players.
The next year, a double homicide in front of David’s Café II
— which sits in the heart of South Beach — marred what
would otherwise have been a peaceful weekend.
“That incident … had nothing to do with the fact that you have a
large African-American population that comes here for Memorial Day
weekend,” says Carlene Sawyer, president of the Miami chapter of the
American Civil Liberties Union. “I’ve walked the streets of South Beach
at 4 in the afternoon and 4 in the morning, and it is a party crowd,
but we’re talking about young professionals.”
While Sawyer says Miami Beach Police have made some progress —
largely through working with the ACLU — she also says gang task
force officers from Miami still show up at nightclubs during the
weekend and frisk African-American partygoers without probable cause.
“The question is: Do you need to use different tactics for these people
who come in because they are black?” she says.
Back at Flamingo Park, Mejia isn’t alone in his tendency to think
about the weekend in terms of race. A man there to play basketball says
he has been racially profiled. “I’ve been arrested for just walking in
the street,” says the black Miami Beach resident, who declined to give
his name. “It’s like, just because you’re black, they think you’re from
Overtown.”
His friend David Crawford, who is white and has lived in Miami Beach
for 21 years, plans to get out of town. But he says, “Race doesn’t have
anything to do with it. On February 14 [during the boat show], this
place is flooded with boat people. It gets ugly. We don’t blame it on
boat people. You get too many church people in one place, you have
problems.”
