From August 2008 to August 2009, there were 137 calls for police help from Tampa’s Mirage nightclub. After-hours at the notorious nightspot were no mirage; it had become an ugly, ongoing, brawling scene that often involved guns. Still does. It’s so disturbing – and predictable – that Tampa Police Department officers — sometimes as many as a dozen — have been routinely assigned there at closing time for the last year.
The most recent incident (last week) picked up by the media involved two hospitalized shooting victims and the arrest of a suspect also accused of pointing a gun at an officer and trying to run over another.
This is an outrage on several, more than manifest, levels. This incubator of violence and magnet for mayhem is still open? TPD officers have to police it? And put their lives at risk for it? And not be somewhere else protecting the innocent?
“It’s a very laborious process,” laments Laura McElroy, TPD spokeswoman. “It’s a last resort for us.” In other words, this involves the sometimes byzantine process of filing a complaint with the city’s nuisance abatement board. Would that this merely involved a “nuisance.” Perhaps the city needs an anarchy abatement board.
But “laborious process?” “Last resort?” I’m just guessing, but had one of the TPD officers been shot – or worse yet, tragically killed – the other night, we would no longer be so accepting of bureaucratic inertia. So why wait?