The City of Miami Beach enacted a curfew and inter-city travel restrictions after a chaotic “spring break” weekend on the beach. Thousands of tourists came from all over the country to have fun in the sun. At least, that’s what most tourists came down to do. Unfortunately, there is a subset of tourists that come to beach towns in different parts of the country who are not friendly to locals. This group may not necessarily constitute the majority of tourists, but they swarm all at once like a pack of locusts and they wreak serious havoc.
It is not a secret that beach town locals dread when events that attract young black people come into town. It is not a racist thought to have or a racist thing to say, because even black locals feel the same way. The issue is that a sizable portion of these people will engage in lawless behavior. There is a general lack of respect for the tourist location that many of these people descend upon. Cities plan for weeks when these types of events are known of ahead of time just to mitigate and/or eliminate the inevitable damage that will happen if they do nothing at all.
When events are planned properly ahead of… let’s say… Black Bike Week, everything will be smooth aside from a slight increase in crime for that weekend. A slight increase in crime is much better than the threat of an outright riot or an extreme spike in isolated crime like robbery and assault. The events need to cater to the black college crowd in order to attract more good kids instead of dope-boys from New York or Georgia. Miami Beach did not appear to have anything planned, and if they did, they did not plan properly.
This year is sort of a perfect storm that landed squarely on Miami Beach like a hurricane. The first issue is the obvious one of Spring Break events. This happens every year. The problem this year was the unprecedented volume of people. The second issue is virus restrictions which have other beach towns across the country like Virginia Beach and Myrtle Beach potentially unavailable or not as open. Then there is the issue of stimulus checks combined with tax returns. And also cheap flights. People are flying from their home states on round-trip flights for $65 with a pocket full of stimulus money after being on lockdown for a while and a possibly toxic and anti-social culture. Recipe for disaster.
SOURCES:
Miami Beach state of emergency, spring break curfew to extend
Covid-19: Miami Beach imposes emergency curfew over spring break ‘chaos’ – BBC News
With over 1,000 arrests already, Miami Beach extends party-ending curfew through spring break | KTLA
Greekfest 1989: Looking back at riots that made Virginia Beach look at itself, look ahead – YouTube
