Zak Stone Phone
Alderman Roland Lemar enjoys an occasional bottle of wine with his wife at Lighthouse Point Park. He called it “inappropriate” to ban booze there and have officers handing out tickets to couples and families relaxing the same way he does.
To East Shore neighbors and police, on the other hand, a few rowdy partiers are ruining the fun for everyone. They advocated a ban on all beer and wine, if it will help the police fight crime. They argued that police can use their discretion to root out the disruptive drinkers from the responsible ones.
Those two views emerged Monday night as the Legislation Committee of the Board of Aldermen met at City Hall to consider on a proposal by the Parks Department to ban beer and wine from Lighthouse Point Park.
After hearing testimony from neighbors and top East Shore cop Lt. Jeff Hoffman, pictured above beside Morris Cove Alderwoman Arlene DePino, aldermen voted to table the amendment until they can do more research. No one from the parks department showed up to speak on the proposal’s behalf.
The proposal would ban drinking everywhere in the park except for the carousel, when rented out private engagements.
Under current law, Lighthouse Point Park is the only park exempted by the city’s ban on public drinking. Thousands of responsible as well as disruptive drinkers – from New Haven to Springfield, Mass. – take advantage of the park’s unique status as a drinking destination on summer weekends and holidays.
However, in recent years drinking at Lighthouse has gotten out of hand, Alderwoman DePino testifed, partly due to the park’s increase in popularity. DePino’s constituents have reported “public urination on front lawns” and “changing out of wet bathing suits on sidewalks” by seriously drunken folks leaving the park. She advocated an alcohol ban as an “extra tool to foster public safety.”
Lt. Hoffman agreed. He said that he has “witnessed conditions in the park deteriorate” because of drinking. There’s more “chaos, danger, and volatility” with the increase of “binge drinking” parties and their associated domestic disputes and drunken driving, he said. The cops cannot do anything but “watch people drink and call the ambulance when someone is too drunk,” said Hoffman.
He admitted that calling an ambulance is not an “every day occurrence.” In the past two years, only eight people were carried away as a result of excessive drunkenness.
Some aldermen on the committee, including Lemar (pictured), Mike Jones, and Greg Dildine, expressed interest in solutions other than a ban. Lemar said that he when he visits the park he sees many “families and neighbors responsibly using alcohol” without having an “impact on their surrounding beachgoers.” He himself enjoys the occasional “bottle of wine at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday evening” at the park in the summer with his wife, he said.
He said that a ban should be put into place only if the city agrees that “there is no reasonable way” to consume alcohol responsibly on the beach. “Is that what we’re saying?” Lemar asked.
Hoffman said that he could not promise that such violations, however minor, would be ignored. Such drinkers would knowingly be “taking the risk” of getting fined $99, he said.
However, he said that drinking at an “under control event” with a “limited amount of alcohol use” is not the primary target of the proposal.
Hoffman said that he is not seeking to initiative a “ticket-writing campaign.” Having the ability to stop drinking before it gets out of hand would be a useful preventive measure, he said. Hoffman likened it to the way that police make decisions about pulling over speeders: Officers use their discretion to pull over vehicles that constitute a public safety hazard but usually ignore the cars traveling at two miles per hour above the limit.
Discretion?
John Cox, of East Shore Community Management Team, testified in support of the amendment. He vouched for Hoffman’s “track record” of appropriate discretion.
Cox said that he and his friends occasionally drink wine in the park. When Hoffman’s team cruises by, the officers never say anything to the undisruptive drinkers, even though they are violating the current drinking ban by having wine in parks other than Lighthouse Point. “Unruly young people,” on the other hand, have been reported and dealt with accordingly, Cox said.
Alderman Jones said that it seems difficult to decide which types of drinking will be permitted and which drinkers will be viewed as “undesirable”– possibly young people and minorities whose parties might not feature “wine and cheese.”
While he personally has no problem with “alcohol in every park in the city,” he said, he believes that all drinking should be held to the same legal standard.
Downtown Alderwoman Bitsie Clark agreed that there is “something disturbing” about such selective enforcement of the current law, under which cops already turn a blind eye to drinking at events like Elm City Shakespeare in Edgerton Park but enforce the drinking ban in other contexts. “Either a law is a law or a law isn’t a law,” she said.
Dildine asked if the police had considered other ways of controlling the crowds, by limiting drinking to certain areas or enforcing the current ban on hard liquor with citations. Hoffman responded that it is “virtually impossible” to tell someone, “Put down that hard alcohol but that beer’s OK.”
With such uncertainty over the issue of discretion, the committee opted to table a decision until a further meeting. The committee will wait until it can hear testimony from a parks department representative, gather more statistics on drinking violations in other parks, and research a historical explanation for Lighthouse Park’s legislative special status.