Riversplash Festival - Lootin' and Shootin'
Although Riversplash was somewhat decent this year (at least on Friday night), the Milwaukee Police Department, and the festival planners, need a little education in festival 101:
1.) Crowd control consists of more than putting up flimsy 'Road Closed' barricades at intersections. It also consists of ACTING when small trouble arises and not just REACTING to big trouble. As in, "What was that? They hit an officer with a bottle? NOW lets call in 200 officers and mounted police and shut this place down!"
2.) You need more than one cop ushering hordes of drunkards with open containers through large, heavily traveled intersections where you have put these flimsy barricades. At some intersections, it wasn't even a cop, just some kid with an orange vest and a light stick waving traffic through.
3.) If you are going to set up a tent and call it the Milwaukee Police Department 'Command Post', you might want to have a few officers 'Commanding' at the post.
4.) If you are a business, and you are going to set up a bar on the street during a festival, you DO NOT stock it with glass bottles, or anything else glass.
5.) Politely ushering the 'inhabitants' of the park (who might think the heavens are raining beer, with all the free, half-empty bottles of perfectly good micro-brew lying around) OUT of the festival area, before the start, might be a good idea. Sure, its a free, inclusive, festival, but that doesn't mean you should encourage an addiction by having a few bums who really like to get drunk and pull their stinky pants down in public, just wake up one morning from their park bench to see that the beergarden they have dreamed about has sprung up all around them. Hey, at least the frat boys had to pay for it before beating each other up...
Remains of a fight around midnight between competing mobs of drunkards in the middle of the street, with oncoming traffic in both directions swerving around them. One police officer came, after the fight had moved into a nearby parking structure, and called an ambulance for one of the men left in the street. The other men were left to run up and down the street with their bloody shirts ripped off, yelling at each other.
