Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Oh, Milwaukee...

City short on funds? I have a plan:

1) Send cops to the General Parking lots at Miller Park about an hour before home games. The anti-cruising task force would be well-suited.
2) Write tickets for underage drinking, drunk-n-disorderly, vandalism, etc.
3) Continue while people are stumbling back to their cars after the game and throwing beer bottles at passers-by.
4) Profit.

A DUI checkpoint, with big buses to hold people for mass processing later, could be helpful, but I think DUI costs more to prosecute than the fine, and we're trying to make money here.

Tonight I spent longer than I care to admit walking up and down looking for my car (sober, I have to press buttons tomorrow, I just always lose my !&%$* car at night games), and I'm pretty sure every single person in that parking lot between the ages of 15 and 25 was drunk. A fair number of them were screaming obscenities at Phillies fans, fat women, and each other. I'm guessing a fair chunk of the 25-45 crowd was drunk, too, but they were quieter.

I spent most of the night having fun and thinking, "It's too bad the Phillies are only here mid-week, it would be fun to have my nephew up, maybe next year..." (his dad likes the Phillies, there is nothing I can do...), and then I left the stadium and realized there's no way in hell I could take a four-year-old into that environment.

It's Wednesday, for Yount's sake. I expect Friday and Saturday nights to be zoo-rific, but school's not out yet.

(Get off my lawn!)

2 comments:

Jane Bellwether said...

But Heather, those people are voters! Doesn't do to make them crabby when the crime rate's goin' sky. They sober up sooner or later, and if you thought they were angry drunks...

My suggestion - hit 'em at the pump. Add a stadium tax to everything from tickets to parking to brats to foam fingers. Make it hefty - 25%. And, like the heinous gas tax, they might grumble a little, but they want what they want and they'll fork out without a pause.

(PS I loved the line "screaming obscenities at Phillies fans, fat women, and each other.")

HeatherRadish said...

Stadium tax just punishes people who want to take their children to see a baseball game without hearing the F-word screamed over and over...

The more I think about it, the more I want to draw a parallel between the kids drinking and being assholes in the parking lot at Miller and the kids drinking and being assholes on the streets to the northeast of the stadium. The proposal to let black city kids drink in the Miller parking lot so they at least weren't blocking the streets was a "bad idea", but when it's white suburban kids wearing $130 hoodies, it's perfectly acceptable. I wonder why this is.