Last Saturday the Starkville Daily news reported on a meeting between members of the Starkville Downtown Business Association and “business and city leaders, law enforcement officials and at least one representative from Mississippi State University,” to address the issue of large crowds gathering downtown late at night and a possible threat to safety. Melissa Dixon, president of the SDBA, wants to bring the possibility of closing downtown streets on game days to the SDBA “to see if they are on board.” The article doesn’t explain what is meant by “closing downtown streets.” It doesn’t address the question of what is currently unsafe about the situation downtown except in this garbled, run-on mess of a sentence: “[merchant concerns] include a few ladies saying they had to go in to an office or shop to work late and were afraid to leave because of the crowd which filled the street and restaurants complain when the street is blocked off and they feel it’s not safe.” Dixon also refers to a recent mugging, for which three people have been arrested. Dixon wants to start a safety committee. Starkville Police Chief David Lindley called street shutdown “an option of last resort.” Lindley explained the current strategy for managing large crowds on Main Street, which includes a combination of foot patrols and video cameras. According to the article, the cameras “record every night from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.” I read the Starkville News every day and find three of four errors like that in every issue.
Police captain Frank Thomas noted that the crowds tend to separate by race and that one night there was a perception that “we were picking on black people.” Officer Thomas is black. I wish that when we see a hundred white college students in the street we could judge them as being every bit as “safe” or “dangerous” as a hundred black college students. For most white people, the hundred black people are always going to look scarier. It shouldn’t be that way. I attended a good number of post-game celebrations (and other large crowd/late night events) in my home town of Chapel Hill, NC, and never felt threatened. In most of these situations the only real danger is somebody is going to trip over something and get hurt.
The strangest comment in the article comes at the end: Bill Kibler, vice president of student affairs at MSU, mentioned another small town that “worked toward a longer-term solution to ‘shift everything back a block.’” What on earth does that mean? Is he talking about moving Mug Shots and Barristers to a point east of the Historic State Theater?
I wonder if letting the bars stay open to 2:00 a.m. would help, people would get tired and the departure times from the bars would be spread out over a longer period, rather than having everyone out at midnight as it is now.
I am going to have to research this further. Our community design professor should give each student $20 drinking money to go out this weekend and find out what is really going on with these crowds.
Read the original article here.
I think keeping the bars open until 2:00am would only make the problem worse. You'd be surprised how much drunker (is that a word) people can get within an hour. The more drunk they are, the more "trouble" they are likely to cause in the streets. Why would closing one block of main street be such a bad thing? There are already hundreds of people walking across the street between bars.
ReplyDeleteThere is a much better article at the Dispatch, you can access it through Starkville Now. I'll put a link in the next post.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like a good idea. When I first went to Carolina, is seems like the police would wait to close the street until the crowd got too big for the sidewalks. Then, at some point, maybe in the late nineties, they began the practice of closing off the street ahead of time and announcing that they were going to do so. I think if we are talking about thousands of people, yeah, close it off. The Dispatch article makes the Chief sound much more cooperative and engaged. Also the idea of street vendors is worth looking into.
These are some good issues to be discussing. I haven't seen the size crowds at night in downtown Starkville that would warrant shuting the street down. Toby, maybe the observation of this should be in your realm. This weekend would be a good time to start. $20 for that kind of research is cheap ;) The other issue that should be discussed is that people on the streets in downtown should make people feel more safe not less. Jane Jacob's "eyes on the street" discussions in the Life and Death of Great Americans Cities is another place you could look.
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