Spring break in South Beach used to be an extraordinary event every year. Tens of thousands of younger people — and many more trying to recapture their youth — made the trek to the legendary land of pastels and churrasco looking to let off a little steam or drink themselves to insensibility.
It was a different world than the Midwest’s gloomy, frigid college campuses. It was warm and sunny, and the costume of the day was skin, skin, and more skin. And for children trying to spread their wings and prove how adult they were, it was the perfect setting. Drinking, drugs, and wall-to-wall sex made Spring Break at South Beach a truly memorable event.
Not so much anymore — at least it’s not “memorable” in the sense that the memories are happy ones.
In a world gone mad, even the playgrounds have been utterly corrupted and destroyed by violence and mayhem. This is a different kind of “freedom” than the carefree, joyous carousing by college kids eager to get on with their adult lives.
There’s a different vibe in South Beach these days. There’s still a lot of drinking and sex, but there’s also a scary edge to the frivolity. And the cops — tolerant and somewhat bemused by the merriment in the past — are now racing from violent incident to violent incident.
“We haven’t asked for spring break in our city. We don’t want spring break in our city. It’s too rowdy, brings too much disorder and is simply too difficult to police,” Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said in a video on Facebook Sunday.
Police have arrested 322 individuals since the end of February and have been working 12-14 hour shifts six days a week to control the unruly crowds. That massive police presence did not deter two shootings on Friday and Sunday that resulted in the death of a young man from Georgia.
Another incident took place on Friday night.
On Friday night, one male victim was killed and another was seriously injured in a shooting that sent panicked crowds scrambling from restaurants and clubs into the streets. Police detained one person at the scene and found four firearms, but no other details have been made available.
David Wallack, owner of Mango’s Tropical Cafe, said nightclubs are being unfairly blamed for the shootings, and city officials need to work more closely with business owners to prevent violence in the future.
“What was going on out in the streets was not customers of businesses,” Wallack said. “The majority of all those people in the street, they’re bringing their own stuff to the party. They don’t have the money to pay $20 a drink.”
Indeed, Fox News’ Judge Jeanine Pirro suggested it wasn’t just college kids coming to the beach and creating chaos.
Pirro argued there shouldn’t be any assumptions that these are only college kids who are on break trying to blow off steam and get drunk.
“That’s not what this is. This is anarchy and chaos. Seventy guns in one week in one city and two dead. I can’t even imagine the number of rapes, the number of overdoses, the number of people that have been involved in assaults that they can’t even remember,” she said. “And I think that between business and law and order, you’ve got to take the side of law and order because, without it, there will be no business.”
I’m sure there are many reasons that violent young adults migrate to events like Spring Break, and some of them are the same reasons that draw college kids. But this violent subculture is of a different flavor altogether than white Midwestern kids looking to hook up and get drunk. And they appear to have become a permanent fixture at gatherings where people go to escape the boredom of life.
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