‘We Can’t Endure This Anymore’: Miami Beach Spring Break Curfew Set After Shootings: Mayor

Updated: 5:37 p.m., Monday

MIAMI BEACH, FL — After two random shootings injured five people in South Beach overnight Sunday and Monday, a "state of emergency" has been declared in Miami Beach and local leaders have imposed a curfew to control spring break crowds and violence.

The curfew will start Thursday at 12:01 a.m. and run through Monday at 6 a.m. The boundaries of the curfew will be in place from the bay to the west and the ocean to the east, and 23rd Street to the north and South Pointe Drive to the south, said City Manager Alina T. Hudak at a news conference Monday afternoon.

She hopes to enact the same curfew the following week, as well.

An early Sunday morning shooting on Ocean Drive near 8th Street sent three people to the hospital, the Miami Herald reported. Four police officers were also injured while clearing the crowd from Ocean Drive, Local 10 News reported.

Two women were also injured in a second shooting that took place early Monday morning on Ocean Drive, this time near 7th Street, CBS Miami reported. One woman was grazed by a bullet and the other was treated for a non-life-threatening injury.

So far this spring, Miami Beach police have confiscated more than 100 guns, Chief Richard Clements said during Monday’s news conference. Last year, 85 weapons were confiscated during the entirety of spring break.

Mayor Dan Gelber expressed his frustration with the violence.

“If you want to see what a very frustrated and angry mayor looks like, you’re looking at him,” he said. “What we’re watching, what we’re feeling, what we’re observing is simply unacceptable at every level.”

The violence broke out despite 371 officers deployed to South Beach over the weekend, the mayor said. This includes about 80 Miami Beach police officers temporarily assigned to the area, as well as officers from a multi-agency unit, including Miami-Dade County Police.

Walking Ocean Drive on Saturday night, just an hour or two prior to the shooting, there was tension in the air, Gelber said. “You could feel it. It was a tinder. You could feel that at any moment something could happen, and that’s just not a way a city should operate.”

He hopes the curfew will deter spring break visitors from coming to Miami Beach, adding, “We don’t want spring break here.”

The mayor said, “We can’t endure this anymore. We just simply can’t. This isn’t your father’s, mother’s spring break. This is something wholly different. We don’t ask for spring break. We don’t promote it. We don’t encourage it. We just endure it and, frankly, it’s nothing something that we want to endure.”

Hudak added, “Our city is an island with limited capacity. It was not built for these types of crowds, and it is not possible to accommodate the volumes of people that we have seen in our public parks, in our public streets and on our sidewalks.”