Miami COVID Narrative Is a ‘Distraction’ from Annual Spring-Break Chaos, City Commissioner Says

Ricky Arriola has seen the images broadcast on cable TV news and social media: Miami Beach police officers firing pepper balls at giant crowds of unruly spring breakers, melees erupting in local restaurants, young people dancing on parked cars and fighting in the streets.

“It’s embarrassing,” said Arriola, a Miami Beach city commissioner. “That’s not who we are.”

For days now, Miami Beach has been a focal point for national media, with much of the attention on the large, mask-less crowds gathered during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. CNN has continued to play images of rowdy Miami Beach spring-break crowds along with CDC warnings of “another avoidable (coronavirus) surge.” A Vox story on Sunday had the headline, “Miami Beach imposes a spring break curfew amid crowding and COVID-19 concerns.”

But as much as national media want to run with a coronavirus-surge narrative, the imposition of curfews on Miami Beach — and the dramatic police efforts to disperse crowds — has less to do with pandemic control than it does about generally keeping the peace, now an annual issue in this island community. Rowdiness, fighting, public intoxication, open drug use, and guns have become staples of spring break on Miami Beach, amplified this year by the pandemic.

Increasingly, Miami Beach has a branding problem, Arriola told National Review.

“We’ve got a lot to offer. Our lead brand can’t be about appealing to young kids who want to raise hell,” he said. “This is starting to overtake the brand that we’ve cultivated for the past 20-plus years of being a high-end, sophisticated city. This is tarnishing our brand.”

“And part of it is our own doing, because we just allow it to happen,” he said.

Arriola is a critic of the restrictive measures Miami Beach leaders have imposed in an effort to curb the spring-break chaos, including 8 p.m. curfews in the city’s entertainment district (the Art Deco Cultural District) and the nighttime closure of the causeways leading to the city. Those restrictions haven’t solved the problem in the past, and he doubts they will now.

“It’s not just this year. It’s every year. It’s the same thing,” Arriola said.

Other city leaders said this year’s spring-break crowd seem to be bigger than in the past, likely driven by residents of other states drawn to Florida’s warm weather, open-for-business attitude, and bargain-priced plane tickets and hotel rooms.

“Our police department has consistently said the volume of people that we’re seeing is unprecedented,” said Miami Beach commissioner Steven Meiner, who noted that many of the people who have been arrested in the entertainment district aren’t actually college students.

Since February 3, police have arrested 1,050 people in the city’s entertainment district, according to police data. More than half of those people, or 542, came from outside of Florida. In that six-week period, police have issued 11,279 traffic citations and seized 102 guns.

Melissa Berthier, a spokeswoman for the city of Miami Beach, said that anecdotally, she has “seen larger crowds” this year. “And it’s not just on the weekends.”

The city commission has granted authority to the city manager to extend a declaration of a state of emergency in one-week periods through April 13, Berthier said. The declaration, which would continue the 8 p.m. curfews — only for the entertainment district — and the 10 p.m. causeway closures Thursday through Sunday, is expected to be issued on Tuesday.

Going forward, Arriola said he’d like the city to offer more programming, such as concerts, to give spring breakers more to do than just drink and loiter in the streets. Ultimately, he said, he’d like the city to make itself less of a spring-break destination. That could mean bringing in new sporting events, fashion shows, food and wine festivals, and boat shows to draw less boisterous crowds of people, who would fill local hotel rooms and keep the restaurants busy.

He pointed to the 2010 Super Bowl and last year’s NCAA championship football game as evidence that Miami can handle large crowds.

“What we can’t handle are crowds that come here and want to go all out and misbehave,” Arriola said. “I think that if we had some programming here, we would either displace some of the spring break crowd that comes, or maybe just get them engaged in a more positive way that isn’t all about drinking and partying.”

Arriola said he believes the threat of spring break turning into a new super-spreader event is “a bit of a distraction,” pointing to the 2021 Super Bowl in Tampa and the reopening of Disney World last July, neither of which has proven to be a significant virus-spreading site.

City leaders noted that the chaos captured by TV news cameras is only occurring in a small section of the city, roughly three blocks wide and ten blocks long.

Myles Chefetz, who owns several prominent restaurants, including the Prime 112 steakhouse just south of the entertainment district, said the national news outlets highlighting the spring-break chaos aren’t telling the whole story. The chaos is a limited problem, limited to a small segment of the city, and will be limited in time, likely another week or two, he said. The coverage is missing a lot of good news in the community, which has a vibrant culture, a booming real-estate market, and new businesses relocating to the area from other states.

“The vision that’s left in people’s minds is that Miami Beach is out of control,” he said. “It’s a distortion of reality to see what we’re seeing on the news. I don’t like it.”

The causeway closures are hurting his businesses, he said, and the curfews — even though his restaurants are not technically in an area under the 8 p.m. curfew — are confusing to people.

“And you know, if you give people a reason not to come, they’re not going to come,” he said.

Chefetz agreed with Arriola that spring break has been an annual problem on Miami Beach, but this year’s crowd is bigger and more unruly than normal. The police response, he said, is not about controlling the spread of the coronavirus, but is instead “a response to potential crime and safety issues.”

The beach community is a natural attraction to young people, Chefetz said, but other cities have been able to keep it under control. Miami Beach should be able to do so, too, he said.

“I’m not against spring breakers coming here,” Chefetz said. “We need to be better prepared.”