PANAMA CITY BEACH — The crowd got to Wal-Mart before police did.
About an hour earlier, as the sun began to set over another day of Spring Break recently, 10 or 20 officers from the Panama City Beach Police, Bay County Sheriff’s Office, the Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco, Florida Highway Patrol and other agencies got to work moving crowds of thousands of people away from the beach.
The pushing began when the beaches behind Club LaVela and Spinnaker started to clear out. Crowds of between 3,000 and 10,000 people cram through the only public beach access toward Thomas Drive.
In the Club LaVela parking lot, PCBPD K-9 officer Argo snarled and barked at anyone who got too close. Cpl. Jason Gleason, Argo’s handler, has wounds on his wrist that show what happens if you get too close to Argo. Spring breakers got the message and slowly cleared out.
In packs of hundreds, they meandered west along South Thomas Drive, jumping in and out of standstill traffic and dancing on cars. By the time they get to Front Beach Road, Argo was waiting, tugging at his restraints, seemingly begging to bite somebody.
From the Circle K at South Thomas and Front Beach, the crowd moved to Wal-Mart. Gleason, Argo and at least a dozen other officers followed, but by the time they crossed the street the Wal-Mart parking lot was pandemonium. Traffic in the parking lot was bumper to bumper, nobody was moving.
When nobody’s moving, groups begin to bump. When they bump, sometimes they fight each other and rob each other, so police do a lot of pushing because pushing them keeps them moving.
“They follow the party,” Police Chief Drew Whitman said. “So we just keep them moving, first for the community’s safety then for their safety.”
Pushing prevents bumping
Some spring breakers tell police they don’t mind being herded, that they feel safer with police around. Others don’t care to be told where to go when they’re not necessarily breaking the law. But the pushing beats the alternative.
In the Wal-Mart parking lot, a couple of Kentucky boys and Minnesota girls who had met each other earlier in the day bumped with another group. There was a dispute over who had the right-of-way. When the Kentucky boys refused to yield because, one of them said, there was nowhere to go, the other group got out of their car.
Chandra Sieben, a student at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, got out of the car to try to cool things down. It didn’t work out.
“This guy tried to punch me, and I blocked it,” Sieben said. “Then he started to choke me.”
There were five or six guys, Sieben said. They began to pull people out of the car. Zack Ziege, a student at the University of Kentucky, was punched and knocked to the ground. Another man was punched twice. They were not hurt badly, they said.
People around filmed it, and one of them sent video footage to Sieben, who showed it to Officer Jacob Moore with the Panama City Beach Police. By the time police showed up and started to clear the parking lot, where pedestrians danced in shopping carts to the music blaring from the cars inching toward Front Beach Road, the attackers had fled in a black sedan.
“This is not how I wanted to end my night,” Ziege said after giving his statement to Moore.
Why Wal-Mart?
“Because Wal-Mart is where they have low prices. Always,” joked Chad Cox.
Cox is a senior marketing major at Southern Mississippi University. He’s got a 3.5 grade-point average, and he came to the beach to let off some steam before finals next week. But he wasn’t really at Wal-Mart for the low prices. He’d been among the crowd leaving the beach about an hour earlier.
Despite signs posting warnings that the parking lot is for Wal-Mart customers only, the parking lot is full of spring breakers like Cox. Police know most of them aren’t there for the rollback prices on bananas.
It’s free parking, police said, so spring breakers take advantage. But the result is a nightly mob of young people who spent the day on the beach. They’re almost all from out of town and many if not most of them have been drinking alcohol. They might not have anywhere better to be either.
Many of these people are part of what police refer to as the “100-mile club,” people who drive a couple of hours to the beach for the weekend or the night. Members of the 100-mile club don’t eat in local restaurants, drink in local bars or stay in local hotels, Whitman said.
The problem was so bad last weekend police shut down the entire parking lot by blocking every entrance and pushing cars out. Police did this about 10 times over a single weekend, Whitman said. Wal-Mart has started to enforce the warning signs and is towing unauthorized cars, Whitman said.
“Once that gridlocks you can’t move because people start blocking,” Whitman said. “That’s when people starting getting frustrated and wanting to fight.”