Charlotte's Successful Fourth? »
Last year, Charlotte put on a Fourth of July spectacular, attracting some 80 thousand revelers and creating a melee of about 2,000 afterwards. Not a good site, apparently. I was actually out of town, so I missed out. Out of this crowd, some 20 were arrested, and one person was shot in the hand. So one-fortieth of the crowd fought, and one out of a thousand involved in the melee were arrested.
This year, by contrast, the primary sponsor pulled out and headed to Knights Stadium. The fireworks remained, however, and somewhere around 25 thousand people were scattered throughout uptown at various venues. This year, only about 500-800 people got caught up in the melee (roughly the size of last year's crowd, on a percentage basis), but someone was shot in the face and 30 were arrested - that's more than three times the rate of last year.
So what happened? By all accounts in the story, the police response was praised. Sure it was - there were nearly five times the police officers (250 vs. 54), you'd expect the response would be praised. But with the same level of activity, was it really a success? The rest of the story sounds to me like people came itching for a fight and they got one: "Police said they ordered people to disperse, but they refused."
Gee, Clem, we told 'em to go home, but they didn't. What you reckon' we ought to do now?
I dunno, Earl, mebbe we should ask 'em real purty like?
Well, that's a possibility, but when the crowd throws bottles, chunks of concrete, bricks and fireworks, you begin to realize that our society may just be perched on the edge of a precipice. It's all dependent on the fact that a police force of 250 can't really control even 500 other people if those 500 others don't really want to be controlled.
By contrast, we came home a bit early and stayed in our generally unsafe section of the city and things were calm. Well, as calm as they normally are, anyway. Turns out we have some neighbors who rather fancy themselves pyros, so we had our own little show in the skies over the East Side. And no melees to speak of. What's even better, it seems all the police were busy uptown. We might just stay home next year too. The seats are better and we didn't even have to fight traffic.
